A mix of memoir, novel and cultural history, this work looks at sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll in the American 1960s. It conveys the impact of the late 60s counterculture and the ways in which the psychedelic and countercultural currents of the era played themselves out in younger lives.

Sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll: the exhilarating but deranging American 1960's, captured in a classic . Dazzling, innovative, and courageous, Dream Time plunges the reader deep into the sensibility of the '60's in a wonderful display of cultural archaeology. Far from being an unqualified celebration of the era, it is a deliberate experiment, combining the genres of memoir, novel, and cultural history in order to convey the complex impact of the late '60's counterculture. When Dream Time was published in 1988, it won Geoffrey O'Brien a Whiting Writer's Award. Previous books on the subject had focused primarily on media icons such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, or Andy Warhol; Dream Time shifts the focus to the ways in which the psychedelic and countercultural currents of the era played themselves out in younger and more marginal lives. If you lived it, but never really came to grips with it; if you missed it but wish you hadn't—this is the book that tells it, at last, like it really was.

Geoffrey O'Brien, the editor-in-chief of Library of America, is a widely published poet, critic, and cultural historian. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, he lives in New York City.