The Best of Times

About the Book

Old-time radio, the folk revival, the golden age of science fiction, steam railroads, baseball, the Western, and other genres color our images of the 1950s. But contrary to the countercultural myth that America during this period was a sterile, soulless society, culturally and intellectually empty, it was an introspective era of innovation and creativity, the seedtime of the sixties, the harbinger of which was the urban folk revival. The Best of Times presents a collection of essays, each followed by a related memoir, focusing on postwar popular culture, exploring topics that mark the era but are also nostalgic in themselves—the comforting continuity of long-running radio shows, train whistles that brought the sweet sorrow of distance to small-town nights, lazy summers of baseball, endless stretches of unknown lands to the West that once compelled the imagination, the heroes and vagabonds of folksong who roamed a simpler world, and dreams of alien civilizations on neighboring planets, deepened by the dawning reality of spaceflight. These pieces balance personal, cultural, and mythic nostalgia, recalling author Wyn Wachhorst’s youth, the postwar era, and its dreams of a fabled West or Norman Rockwell’s small-town America. Blending history, memoir, imagery, and analysis, this collection of essays offers poetic reflections on the nature of nostalgia and postwar America.

About the Author

Growing up in America in the forties and fifties, Wyn Wachhorst lived the topics of these essays. He performed in the urban folk music revival, was part of the duck-and-cover generation, and came of age in a time before television eclipsed radio, football superseded baseball, and crime shows replaced Westerns, a time before the reality of spaceflight displaced the wonders of science fiction and the romance of the railroad receded into history. His book, The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity (Basic Books), was on the science bestseller lists of Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth (MIT Press) was a history book club selection, picked by Choice as an outstanding book of the year, and reviewed favorably in Newsweek, Discover, Smithsonian, Science, the New York Times, London Sunday Times, and some three dozen other publications. His fifty-five articles and essays have appeared in the Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Southwest Review, San Francisco magazine, Narrative magazine, Endless Vacation, Mechanical Engineering, Isis, Extrapolation, Explorers’ Journal, Planetary Report, the Journal of American History, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle and in anthologies. Three of his essays were noted in Best American Essays, and one recently won the McGinnis-Ritchie Prize for best essay of the year. He writes speeches and articles for Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin and was asked by NASA’s Decade Planning Team to write the new NASA myth, an inspirational long-term mission statement. Wachhorst received his Ph.D. in American history from Stanford and taught history and American studies at Stanford, the University of California Santa Cruz, and San Jose State. He resides with his wife in Atherton, California.