The sixties in America was a wild, giddy ride, an amazing Technicolor adventure, and no magazine caught the spirit of its apocalyptic fun as definitively as Esquire. Its brilliant, buccaneering editor Harold Hayes transformed the once-somnolent men's fashion magazine into a literary and cultural proving ground, where pure iconoclasm and blazing talent reigned. Art director George Lois put Sonny Liston on the cover as Santa Claus and Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian.

Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Garry Wills, Michael Herr, and others virtually invented a "New Journalism" equal to the task of deconstructing celebrity, celebrating pop culture, comprehending wars and demonstrations and riots and assassinations. Diane Arbus captured photographic images that reflected a disturbing, hidden America, and fiction writers as diverse as Norman Mailer and Raymond Carver did much the same in words.

1. Journalist and historian Carol Polsgrove has written the definitive history of this decade-long high-water mark in American magazine journalism.