There is a novel by Philip K. Dick, which, published in 1959, evokes the fifties: President Eisenhower's stroke; Main Street, U.S.A; Marilyn Monroe; a world of neighbors and PTAS; small retail chain stores (the produce trucked in from the outside); favorite television programs; mild flirtations with the housewife next door; game shows and contests; sputniks distantly revolving overhead, mere blinking lights in the firmament, hard to distinguish from airlines or flying saucers. If you were interested in constructing a time capsule or an 'only yesterday' compendium or documentary-nostalgia video from the 1950s, this might serve as a beginning: to which you could add short haircuts, early rock and roll, longer skirts, and so on. The list is not a list of facts or historical realities (although its items are not invented and are in some sense 'authentic'), but rather a list of stereotypes, of ideas of facts and historical realities.

Source type: picture
Info: Philip K. Dick, Time Out of Joint, 1959
Original size: 359x581 px. Edit