A Chronicle of Wasted Time

About the Book

A Chronicle of Wasted Time is a cultural history of the 1970s in America. It presupposes that the Seventies had a distinct character, although it cannot be so sharply defined as the Sixties or Eighties. A book on the Seventies joins almost innumerable unresolved elements, and what troubled that decade continues to trouble us. The difficult part is that these troubling elements do not connect, so that a continuous narrative is often impossible to maintain. Yet there was something like a “culture” of the Seventies, however disconnected the parts. That culture is the theme of the book.

About the Author

Frederick R. Karl is the author of several books: biographies of Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and George Eliot; as well as several volumes of literary criticism, among them American Fictions: 1940-1980 and Modern and Modernism. He is, also, general editor and volume co-editor of the Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. His most recent books for Xlibris are American Fictions: 1980-2000 and Quest for Biography. Married, father of three daughters, and grandfather of five children, he has taught at the City College of New York, Columbia, and New York University.