Author Description

On a hot summer night in 1963, a teenager named Walt Crowley hopped off a bus in Seattle's University District, and began his own personal journey through the 1960s. Four years later at age 19, he was installed as "rapidograph in residence" at the Helix, the region's leading underground newspaper. His cartoons, cover art, and political essays helped define his generation's experience during that tumultuous decade. Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle weaves Crowley's personal experience with the strands of international, intellectual, and political history that shaped the decade. As both a member and in-house critic of the New Left and counter-culture, the author offers a unique perspective in explaining why the experiments and excess of the period "made sense at the time."