The Conspiracy of the Young

New York: The World Publishing Company, 1970. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. [10], 399, [5] pages. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. Erasure residue on fep. Minor edge soiling noted. Paul Lauter (spouse of Florence Howe) is the Smith Professor of Literature at Trinity College. He has served as president of the American Studies Association and is a major figure in the revision of the American literary canon. Lauter writes about movement activities from the perspective of a full-time participant: 1964 Mississippi freedom schools; Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); the Morgan community school in Washington, DC; a variety of antiwar, antidraft actions; the New University Conference; The Feminist Press, which he helped found; and the United States Servicemen's Fund, an organization supporting antiwar GIs. He got fired, got busted, got published, and even got tenure. Florence Howe was an American author, publisher, literary scholar, and historian. She earned a BA from Hunter College in English, and a MA in English from Smith College. Her life and work were focused on feminism and social justice. She founded Feminist Press in 1970. In 1973, she became the president of the Modern Language Association. She was a college professor and taught women's studies at Goucher College. In 1971, she became professor of Humanities at SUNY. She wrote or edited more than a dozen books and more than 120 essays. Her essays were published in the Harvard Educational Review, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the Women's Review of Books, and a variety of anthologies. Her books included a memoir, A Life in Motion and a collection of essays, Myths on Coeducation. The Conspiracy of Youth is both a manifesto on and an argument for rationally facing the question of what does this country owe its young, and what do they owe it? In the course of determining why many young people seem bent on the destruction of so many American institutions, Paul Lauter and Florence Howe have been forced to draw a searlingly relevant portrait of what it is like to be young in America. Do the conventional institutional channels of education, training, employment, and service offer the young the opportunity to shape their own destinies and decide on the form and quality of their lives?