Writers’ Room of Boston Sponsors Documentary Screening
and Literary Discussion September 15

Former Bostonian Dan Wakefield began his writing career in a unique time and a unique place—New York City in the 1950s. It was a place of glamour, excitement, art, sex, and psychoanalysis. What
Paris was in the 1920s, New York City was in the 1950s.

A few years ago, Wakefield revisited the decade and his fellow writers. From his sanctuary in the Writers’ Room of Boston, Wakefield wrote New York in the Fifties, a best-selling book that captures the period and the watershed literature it produced. Now filmmaker Betsy Blankenbaker has created what the New York Times calls a “richly atmospheric” film based on the book, featuring interviews
with and vintage footage of the personalities that changed the literary face of America.

Blankenbaker skillfully interweaves these one-on-one interviews with Wakefield’s personal story. Audiences are treated to intimate discussions with today’s cultural elite. Robert Redford, who was an artist as well as an actor in the ’50s in New York City, muses about Salinger and suicide. David Amram, founder of the Village Gate, talks about folk music and Bob Dylan. Writer Calvin Trillin reveals why the New York Times was “almost like a vast massage parlor” in the ’50s. Novelist Ivan Gold (the founding president of the Writers’ Room of Boston) elaborates on the alcohol consumption of the period. The film includes rare black-and-white footage of James Baldwin lecturing, Jack Kerouac reading to jazz accompaniment by Steve Allen on the piano, and Norman Mailer arguing with Germaine Greer on the “great orgasm debate.”

On September 15, the Writers’ Room of Boston will present a screening of New York in the Fifties
and a conversation with Wakefield, and music by the Pierre Hurel trio. The event starts at 2 p.m.
at the C. Walsh Theatre at Suffolk University, 41 Temple Street, Boston. Tickets are $20 general admission; $10 for students. Proceeds will help support the Writers’ Room, a nonprofit corporation that has been providing affordable, quiet, and secure workspace for Boston-area writers for 14 years.

To order tickets, print out the form and mail it to:
The Writers’ Room of Boston, Inc.
111 State Street, Boston, MA 02109-2999
Or Call to order at: (617) 523-0566