In A Fiction of the Past, Dominick Cavallo pushes past the contemporary fog of myth, cold disdain and warm nostalgia that shrouds the radical youth culture of the sixties. He explores how the furiously chaotic sixties sprang from the comparatively placid forties and fifties. The book also digs beyond the post-World War II decades and seeks the historical sources of the youth culture in the distant American past.

What were the historical precedents of the political ideas advanced by Students for a Democratic Society, the largest student group in American history? Where does the hippie counterculture - that strange melange of sex, drugs, rock and roll and "do your own thing" individualism - fit into the broad sweep of American culture and history? A Fiction of the Past not only sutures the youth culture to American history, but shows how its most radical ideas and values were deeply etched in the American grain.