NONFICTION - July 19, 1992

NEW YORK IN THE 50s by Dan Wakefield (Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence: $24.95; 355 pp.) Dan Wakefield’s “New York in the 50s” is so full of remarkable details from life in the ‘50s that it would be a crime to review the book without highlighting a few. For instance: Sociologist (and Wakefield mentor) C. Wright Mills was a motorcycle buff, riding his BMW to his office at Columbia University “like an intellectual guerrilla warrior”; John Gregory Dunne, just out of the Army in 1956 and unpublished, got his first journalism job by passing off stories from a Colorado newspaper as his own; Wakefield met fellow journalist Seymour Krim in a drunken clinch at the White Horse Tavern when Krim came to the defense of a woman upon whom Wakefield had poured a beer after she had dared criticize Murray Kempton; eight publishers rejected Norman Mailer’s third book “The Deer Park” despite the author’s fame (the novel became a best-seller); a young writer once took his beautiful date to hear Charlie Mingus at the Five Spot, only to look on helplessly as the bassist pulled out a pair of handcuffs, chained himself to her, and led the woman away. You’ll find similar facts on every other page of “New York in the 50s” but the best thing about the book is that Wakefield, primarily a novelist, has woven them together into an easygoing, good-natured narrative. Those who came of age in the ‘50s have been called “the silent generation,” but Wakefield shows here that in private his crowd was anything but, constantly talking with friends and colleagues, bartenders and analysts.