Author Description

These seventeen chapters of personal memoir, published journalism, art criticism, and cultural history provide a kind of social review of post-'60s America. Coe's journalism appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and Arts & Leisure section, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, Esquire, New York, California, American Theatre, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. The writing collected here is a fraction of what he published, plus seven stories that never saw the light of day. The journey from Big Sur journal-keeper to cultural historian might seem jarring, but so did Coe's life at the time. These seventeen chapters present different tones and textures, different ways of looking at things. The majority are profiles--life histories, artistic odysseys, and career sagas, reflecting my interests in the journeys people take, in the arts especially. Coe loved going in places and meeting people and figuring out what made a place tick. He wrote about people who thought they could re-invent the world, and he also felt an affinity for misfits, forgotten geniuses, and the ignored. Impermanence was a constant theme, as many of the things Coe wrote about would either dissolve or alter drastically as time went on. Another theme in SURVIVORS is the complex, constantly evolving relationship between tradition and innovation, in the performing arts especially. Taking these chapters together, they do provide a kind of cultural review, touching not only on the live and visual arts but also on art neighborhoods, a skydiving colony, poetry, ceramics, restaurants, Freudian psychology, women's body-building, Buddhism, cultural theory, and the politics of race. Coe writes about how things were changed, and how we were changed, and what changed us. Many of the chapters of SURVIVORS comment on what Coe's refers to at one point as "the madness and surreality of an American Age." He writes about artists and thinkers and dreamers who survived the cultural revolution of the '60s and