David Mamet is a defiant writer in the age of conformity

Santa Monica, California

In the 1980s and 1990s, countless films, television documentaries, and history books taught us that the 1950s were years of conformity and conventionalism: The Donna Reed Show, McCarthyism, The Organization Man, TV Dinner. Indeed, the 1950s were a time of extraordinary artistic creativity, limitless technological innovation, original thinking in politics, intellectual diversity in journalism and higher education, renewed energy in religion, and tremendous advances in race relations. What the ’80s and ’90s confused with conformity was a naturally occurring cultural solidarity—something nearly everyone, left or right, longs for today.