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PAUL LAUTER is A. K. & G. M. Smith Professor of Literature Emeritus at Trinity College (Hartford). He was president of the American Studies Association and has won many awards from the academic associations in which he has worked, including, most recently, the Modern Language Association's Francis March Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession of English Studies and the Working-Class Studies Association's Lifetime Achievement Award.

As a teacher, Lauter applied what he had learned in the movements to reconstruct ideas about which writers mattered—women as well as men, minorities as well as whites: Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Adrienne Rich as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway. Using that principle, he led a team that created a very successful collection, The Heath Anthology of American Literature.

The conflicts of the Sixties fractured the nation and remain a central fault line in American culture half a century later. In Our Sixties Paul Lauter chronicles his participation - as activist, organizer, and educator - in the "Movement" events of the period, including Mississippi Summer, the Selma-Montgomery March, draft-card burnings, the Pentagon demonstration, and the founding of The Feminist Press. Social history as well as personal account, Our Sixties speaks to those who recall that turbulent decade as well as those wishing to understand its impact on American politics and society today.