50 Years of Dissent

A selection of influential articles from a prestigious magazine celebrating its fiftieth anniversary

Dissent was founded in 1954 by intellectuals angered by the rightward drift of the country but uneasy with the dogmatism they saw on the American left, and it has provoked debates about political ideas and about American and global issues ever since.

This provocative book--a collection of articles published in Dissent over the past fifty years--presents essays from each decade of Dissent's life that reveal how the magazine viewed that era, along with a new foreword to each section written by a contemporary Dissenter that provides perspective on the period.

Articles include:

* Norman Mailer on "Surplus Values and Mass Media"

* Irving Howe on "New Styles in Leftism"

* Theodore Draper on "Ghosts of Vietnam"

* Sean Wilentz on "Bankruptcy and Zeal"

* Michael Kazin on "A Patriotic Left"

* Dwight MacDonald on "America, America"

* and much more

Nicolaus Mills is a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. Michael Walzer is UPS Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of more than a dozen books, including On Toleration and The Jewish Political Tradition, Volumes I and II, all published by Yale University Press.