Inhalt: Including contributions by Elizabeth BishopTruman CapoteJohn CheeverRoald DahlJanet FlannerNadine GordimerA. J. LieblingDwight MacdonaldJoseph MitchellMarianne MooreVladimir NabokovSylvia PlathV. S. PritchettAdrienne RichLillian RossPhilip RothAnne SextonJames ThurberJohn UpdikeEudora WeltyE. B. WhiteEdmund Wilson And featuring new perspectives by Jonathan FranzenMalcolm GladwellAdam GopnikElizabeth KolbertJill LeporeRebecca MeadPaul MuldoonEvan OsnosDavid Remnick The 1950s are enshrined in the popular imagination as the decade of poodle skirts and "I Like Ike." But this was also a complex time, in which the afterglow of Total Victory firmly gave way to Cold War paranoia. A sense of trepidation grew with the Suez Crisis and the H-bomb tests. At the same time, the fifties marked the cultural emergence of extraordinary new energies, like those of Thelonious Monk, Sylvia Plath, and Tennessee Williams. The New Yorker was there in real time, chronicling the tensions and innovations that lay beneath the era's placid surface. In this thrilling volume, classic works of reportage, criticism, and fiction are complemented by new contributions from the magazine's present all-star lineup of writers, including Jonathan Franzen, Malcolm Gladwell, and Jill Lepore. Here are indelible accounts of the decade's most exciting players: Truman Capote on Marlon Brando as a pampered young star; Emily Hahn on Chiang Kai-shek in his long Taiwanese exile; and Berton Roueché on Jackson Pollock in his first flush of fame. Ernest Hemingway, Emily Post, Bobby Fischer, and Leonard Bernstein are also brought to vivid life in these pages. The magazine's commitment to overseas reporting flourished in the 1950s, leading to important dispatches from East Berlin, the Gaza Strip, and Cuba during the rise of Castro. Closer to home, the fight to break barriers and establish a new American identity led to both illuminating coverage, as in a portrait of Thurgood Marshall at an NAACP meeting in Atlanta, and trenchant commentary, as in E. B. Wh