This chapter examines Kerouac in the context of 1950s literary culture in the United States, with particular emphasis on the Cold War. The 1950s was the decade Kerouac became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road, and the decade he produced the bulk of his most significant writing, including Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, and Mexico City Blues, among others. This chapter explores the relationship between Kerouac’s literary production during the 1950s and the multilayered cultural imperatives of the Cold War.

This chapter discusses the ways in which psychoanalytic concepts influenced the American popular Gothic during the post-war era. The 1950s and 1960s were what Nathan G. Hale has described as the ‘Golden Age of Popularization’ for psychoanalytic thought in the United States. The historical underpinnings of this psychoanalytic ‘boom’ period are discussed, with a focus upon the prominent place occupied by American ego psychology during this period. As argued, this influence soon permeated the ‘popular Gothic’ fiction of the era, which was characterised by texts which revolved around tensions rooted in the dysfunctional nuclear family, sexual and emotional repression, and unresolved childhood trauma. The work of authors such as Robert Bloch, Charles Beaumont, William March and Ira Levin is considered. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the late 1970s ‘Satanic Panic’ scare, which drew upon both core psychoanalytic principles and the most lurid elements found in works of horror fiction such as Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and The Exorcist (1971), severely damaged the movement’s reputation in the United States.

History seemed to be on the side of Hungarian refugees arriving in Britain in the winter of 1956–1957. Public sympathy for these ‘heroes’ who had stood up to Soviet oppression chimed with wider Cold War politics, while an expanding economy in need of workers seemed to ensure that they would settle quickly into British society. But if Britain’s enthusiastic welcome of the Hungarians – supported by a mammoth voluntary effort – seemed to show it as a self-confident nation, cracks rapidly began to show. The Suez crisis had revealed Britain’s waning power, a trend reflected in many Hungarian refugees’ desire to move on to America or Canada. Refugees’ lack of ‘gratitude’ was to come up time and again as volunteers, camp workers and the public found Hungarians uncooperative and demanding. Resonating with contemporary fears over generational conflict, once ‘resettled’, wayward behaviour by young male refugees saw them labelled ‘juvenile delinquents’ or ‘Central European teddy boys’. Where their foreignness intersected with local concerns with competition over work or local ‘girls’, xenophobia spilled over into hostility and violence. This was in many ways a foretaste the 1958 Notting Hill riots, and demonstrated that beneath a veneer of British self-confidence, many Britons were experiencing profound disquiet at the ways in which the country was changing.

Chapter 9 probes the ‘women-in-music’ trope. Leah Branstetter deftly draws upon the work of Joanna Russ to examine how women have been marginalised within rock music. She considers the tendency of historiographies of rock to construct female rock musicians as anomalies, to devalue their contributions, and to resist categorising their music as ‘authentic’.

With the founding of the two German states in 1949, the period of political transition in postwar Germany came to an end. Nazi trials, however, continued in both West and East Germany. The Epilogue examines how policy toward Nazi prosecutions changed with independence in both the Federal Republic and German Democratic Republic. West Germany pursued a policy of rehabilitation for most former Nazis, coupled with the further prosecution of small numbers of ‘intolerable” Nazi atrocities. This was part of a strategy of “democratization via integration.” Meanwhile, East German continued a more robust prosecution program, even if the number of trials was still substantially smaller than during the occupation period. The epilogue also recapitulates the argument of the book. Worse trials in the West helped inadvertently to democratize the emerging Federal Republic of Germany, while better trials in the East contributed to the consolidation of a new, Stalinist dictatorship. Transitional justice in Germany thus produced counter-intuitive results at odds with the prevailing wisdom among scholars and activists.

Percy’s classic novel grapples self-consciously with the complexities of its relation to a sense of place and its setting in mid-twentieth-century New Orleans. Percy himself was ambivalent about New Orleans, just as the protagonist of his novel is, and chose to live on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain to avoid the distractions of the city, and his deliberate dislocation vis-à-vis the famous city undergirds his deeply philosophic inquiry into the meaning of place, an inquiry tha, for the main character in the novel is tied to the posttraumatic stress disorder that followed his wounding in the Korean War.

Eleanor Spencer explores the topography of poetry in Britain during the 1950s and early 1960s, suggesting that what we find is a series of what Al Alvarez saw as reactions to and rejections of that which came before. Plath emerges from a period which saw the Movement’s repudiation of the aesthetic and intellectual confusion of the New Romantics in favour of directness, communicability, and an incisive New Critical sensibility. Just six years later, however, Alvarez’s introduction to The New Poetry (1962) disavowed the ‘gentility’ of the Movement’s ‘academic-administrative verse’, calling instead for a poetry which ‘nakedly, and without evasion’ registered the ‘forces of disintegration’ in the post-WWII and Cold War era that threatened not only a familiar English way of life, but life itself.