Which of the literary works of the 1950s and 60s reflected the sexual revolution?

[charlie48]

First of all... Hello everyone !
I'm new on this forum and I wish to find answers for some of my literature-based questions.
I was wondering if you could tell me which of the British literary works of the 1950s and 60s reflected sexual revolution and social changes of that time?
My first guess would be "Lady Chatterly's Lover" (only it wasn't from the 50s nor 60s) and John Robinson's "Honest to God". But what other books reflected what the new generation of young Britons wanted/believed in/disagreed with?

[Pompey Bum]

Hello Charlie. Welcome to the site.

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook anticipated some of what was coming by exploring (among other things) the idea of a woman making her own decisions about herself and men. It was a complicated book, though, and in some ways it became a greater symbol to the sexual revolution than Lessing may have intended.

[charlie48]

Thank you Pompey Bum Oh, I haven't considered Lessing. Unfortunately, the only book written by her I've read was The Grass is Singing. Off topic - Do you think that young people of the Swinging Sixties were interested in literature? I do not wish to offend anyone but to me the youth of that time was much more interested in music and performance art rather than reading in general.

[Pompey Bum]

I was a little boy in the '60s, but I was keenly aware of the adult world, partly because my parents watched Walter Cronkite every night, but mostly (believe it or not) through Mad Magazine, which was a lot more politically and socially aware than it apparently is now. Anyway, yes, the Now Generation read, and was quite interested in unconventional writers. Some liked Ken Kesey and Jack Kerouac, and everyone read Joseph Heller, who didn't actually write Catch-22 in the '60s, I think, but it was popular then. Some of the then notorious books Henry Miller had written in the '30s were finally published by the mainstream press in the '60s, and Phillip Roth, a great writer, was a bit notorious himself for Portnoy's Complaint. If a book pushed the envelope (especially in terms of sex), '60s readers usually dug it.

There were also some terrible--or at least terribly ephemeral--writers everyone thought were going to live for ages. One was Terry Southern (who?), author of The Magic Christian, a largely forgotten (but then all the rage) pornographic novel called Candy, and (saved from the dustbin of time by Kubrick's great film) Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Willard Manus (who?) penned the long-forgotten Mott the Hoople, the name of which was adopted by the only slightly less ephemeral (and actually pretty good) British rock band called Mott the Hoople. And there was another long forgotten porno everyone was reading at the time called Naked Came the Stranger. I can't for the life of me remember the author (just the lurid cover featuring a young lady who had neglected to dress for the photograph). I read some of these books in the '70s (and, okay, I used to keep a copy of Candy under my mattress ), so I can personally testify to how bad they were. Reading them now, though, would probably provide a more accurate reflection of the zeitgeist than Doris Lessing. I'm just sayin'.