The red hot vacuum & other pieces on the writing of the sixties

'The Red Hot Vacuum' is a constantly provocative assessment of the leading writers ofthe Nineteen Sixties, a decade when the literary giants of the past faded from the scene and in their wake, notes the author in his preface to these 37 essays, the literary consensus broke apart, like the social and political one, and the market for serious writing "soon became a kind of howling forum where all manner of ideas, styles, and standards contended for attention." Theodore Solotaroff's critical writings bring a notable lucidity and perspective to "the red hot vacuum" at the core of this chaotic creative age-a time of "the shrinkage of extremes between hard thought and easy attitudinizing, between originality and novelty, relevance and chic, distinction and celebrity." Editor-in-chief of the pioneering New American Review (and before that Associate Editor of Commentary and Editor of the New York Herald Tribune's literary supplement, Book Week), Solotaroff focuses his stringent yet sympathetic intellect on authors whose works came to full flower in the Sixties-Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O'Connor, Anthony Burgess, Susan Sontag and James Purdy among them-as well as on the new work of established but newly relevant figures such as Sartre, Camus, Irving Howe, Richard Wright and Paul Goodman.