Author Talk with Frye Gaillard, Author of A Hard Rain: America in the 1960's

On Tuesday, August 13th at 7 PM at Vineyard Haven Library, author Frye Gaillard will give a talk based on his newest book, 'A Hard Rain: America in the 1960's, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost.' Books will be available for purchase and signing, and refreshments will be served.

'A Hard Rain' focuses on the 1960's, pivotal decade in American history. With graceful prose and a storyteller's eye, Frye Gaillard captures the hope and tragedy of the 1960s, beginning with the idealism of the civil rights movement, and ending with the violence brought about by the war in Vietnam. He also examines the cultural manifestations of change – music, literature, art, religion, and science – and so we meet not only the Brothers Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, but also Gloria Steinem, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Harper Lee, Mister Rogers, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Billy Graham, Thomas Merton, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Angela Davis, Barry Goldwater, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Berrigan Brothers.

“There are many different ways to remember the sixties,” Gaillard writes, “and this is mine. There was in these years the sense of a steady unfolding of time, as if history were on a forced march, and the changes spread to every corner of our lives. As future generations debate the meaning of the decade, I hope to offer a sense of how it felt to have lived it. A Hard Rain is one writer’s reconstruction and remembrance of a transcendent era — one that, for better or worse, lives with us still.”

Frye Gaillard, writer in residence at the University of South Alabama, has written extensively on southern race relations, politics and culture. He is former Southern Editor at The Charlotte Observer, where he covered Charlotte’s landmark school desegregation controversy, the ill-fated ministry of televangelist Jim Bakker, the funeral of Elvis Presley, and the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Gaillard has written or edited more than twenty-five books, and his award-winning titles include Go South to Freedom, Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America; The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina; Watermelon Wine: The Spirit of Country Music; If I Were a Carpenter: Twenty Years of Habitat for Humanity; Prophet from Plains: Jimmy Carter and His Legacy; and As Long As the Waters Flow: Native Americans in the South and East.