You don’t often hear people referencing Philip Wylie these days, but from the late Twenties through the late Sixties, he was one of the most popular, prolific, influential and at times controversial writers in America. Wylie not only wrote novels, short stories, and articles for everything from the Saturday Evening Post and Popular Mechanics to Harper’s and academic journals, but newspaper columns and screenplays as well. Part of the problem, why he’s so thoroughly forgotten today, may be that even in his lifetime, as ubiquitous as he was, he was almost impossible to pin down. In many ways, he was reminiscent of Gore Vidal, and it’s entirely likely, and for the same reasons, Gore Vidal will be just as sadly forgotten forty years from now.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Wylie grew up in Montclair, New Jersey and graduated from Princeton in 1923. He began writing science fiction and mystery stories for the pulps, and his 1930 novel Gladiator has long been rumored to have been the central influence on the creation of Superman. Other stories and novels were said to have inspired Flash Gordon and Doc Savage. In the early Thirties he also began writing screenplays, working on both Island of Lost Souls and James Whale’s The Invisible Man. But Wylie was a polymath with a solid working knowledge of psychology, biology, physics, anthropology, sociology and engineering, elements of which would work their way into not only his science fiction, but his social criticism, his writings on policy issues, even articles about deep sea fishing and gardening. A 1952 article on growing orchids led to a nationwide gardening fad. He wrote cleverly and thoughtfully about gender issues, and though grossly misinterpreted at the time as a misogynist, Wylie, as a male writer, was actually decades ahead of his time. He wrote about UFOs and education. He railed against censorship of any kind. He touted the importance of civil defense preparedness years before backyard fallout shelters or duck and cover drills came into vogue. His incredibly popular “Crunch & Des” stories, about the adventures of a charter fishing boat captain in the Gulf of Mexico, resulted in a short-lived 1955 television series starring Forrest Tucker, and his 1933 novel When Worlds Collide was adapted into George Pal’s 1951 apocalyptic sci-fi epic.

His 1945 speculative short story “The Paradise Crater” envisioned the Nazis using Uranium 237 to develop an atomic bomb. Problem was, the Manhattan Project was still underway, the first atomic test was still a few months down the pike, and no one was supposed to know anything about Uranium isotopes, let alone their role in the development of nuclear weapons. As a result, Wylie found himself placed under house arrest until it could be determined he wasn’t a spy. Ironically, his continued interest in the science and sociology of nuclear war (it would be at the heart of several novels and countless non-fiction essays) earned him a job as an advisor to the precursor of the Atomic Energy Commission.

He was also a book editor and the one-time director of the Lerner Marine Laboratory in Florida. Oh, he did every damn thing, but what he did best of all, it seems, was piss people off.

As a sharp-eyed satirist, iconoclast, and social critic, Wylie (to quote Mike Wallace from a 1957 television interview) “ violated taboos by attacking American moral values, Christianity, Doctors, Teachers, and Statesmen, to name just a few.” A number of those attacks can be found among the far-reaching essays collected in his 1942 anthology Generation of Vipers. Apart from When Worlds Collide and its sequel, After Worlds Collide, Generation of Vipers was among the first of Wylie’s books I encountered randomly. I saw a first edition selling for cheap at Gotham Book Mart and dug the title, so picked it up. It was astonishing, not only for the savagery of the prose—which foreshadowed Hunter Thompson—but also his range of targets. How he could publish wicked attacks on American morality, religion, and politics in those early gung-ho years of WWII without being charged with treason is nothing short of amazing. More amazing still, he was skewering the myth of Eisenhower’s America a decade before Eisenhower’s America existed.

Of all the attacks aimed at a fistful of sacred cows, none was more inflammatory, none raised more of a shrill public shitstorm than is attack on what he called “Momism.” To quote just a brief passage:

“"Men live for her, and die for her, dote upon her, and whisper her name as they pass away. In a thousand of her, there is not enough sex appeal to budge a hermit ten paces off a rock ledge. She plays bridge with the stupid veracity of a hammerhead shark. She couldn’t pass the final examinations of a fifth grader.”

Okay, you can attack the government, attack the Catholic Church, attack the schools and the stupidity of the masses all you want and few will raise an eyebrow, but for godsakes the one thing you can’t attack is mom. Fifteen years after its original publication, Wylie was still getting death threats for that essay, and fifteen years later he was still attacking Eisenhower’s America, by name this time, writing “we have gradually become a nation of exalted ignoramuses.” That same year, 1957, he had also just published a screed against organized religion as a whole and Christianity specifically, The Innocent Ambassadors, which was something else you might not want to be doing in 1957. Worse still, he publicly advocated stoning Liberace to death with marshmallows.

West Eleventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is one of the “nicest” blocks in Greenwich Village, a leafy street lined with handsome Greek Revival townhouses and stately apartment buildings. One house stands out, literally: 18 West Eleventh, which became an unlikely nexus of privileged status and radical politics during the Vietnam War era.

Born in 1945, Cathy Wilkerson grew up in haute bourgeois comfort in Connecticut. When her parents divorced she stayed with her mother; her father, an executive at the ad agency Young & Rubicam, remarried and in 1963 bought 18 West Eleventh. That year Cathy, a sophomore at Swarthmore, was arrested while picketing outside a dangerously decrepit and overcrowded black school in Chester, Connecticut. A few years later she was at SDS headquarters in Chicago editing New Left Notes, SDS’s newsletter. When the Students for a Democratic Society began in 1962 it was mainly involved in civil rights issues, but from the mid-1960s on it grew increasingly active in the antiwar movement. In 1969, SDS claimed a hundred thousand members on college campuses nationwide. Wilkerson attended the national convention in Chicago that June, when SDS burst apart at the seams. Fed up with the organization’s policy of nonviolent protest, which seemed to be having little effect, a faction calling themselves Weatherman from the line in Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” essentially hijacked and later dismantled SDS. Among its leaders were Mark Rudd, who as chairman of the SDS chapter at Columbia had led a 1968 student uprising there, and Bernadine Dohrn. Wilkerson went along with them. Weatherman styled themselves as a cadre of the world armed revolt against U.S. imperialism and as a corollary to the Black Panther Party. They adopted Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two Panthers killed in a police raid, as role models and patron saints. Never more than a thousand committed members nationwide, Weatherman set themselves the goals of radicalizing the nation’s working class, disrupting government and corporate operations, and bringing about the revolution in America by any means necessary. Attempts to organize the working class and to align with the Panthers would fail miserably: Workers beat them up and the Panthers rejected them as “scatterbrains.” Meanwhile their violence alienated the rest of the antiwar movement.

Weatherman’s first public action was a demonstration in Chicago that fall that came to be known as Days of Rage. They’d expected tens of thousands of protesters, but only a few hundred showed up. From its starting point in a park the march flowed out into the streets and soon got out of hand, with protesters breaking car and shop windows. Cops chased them through the streets, shooting a few, bludgeoning and arresting others, including Wilkerson. She was out on bail two weeks later. Having proven to themselves the futility of public demonstrations, Weatherman now turned to direct action. “We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare,” one of them orated. Looking back on this moment forty years later in her memoir Flying Close to the Sun, Wilkerson writes, “Now it seems fantastic that I responded to the clear signs of political idiocy” by going along. Breaking up into small cells in secret locations around the country, they went into an intense period of self-indoctrination, hoping to transform themselves from middle-class college kids into “more effective tools for humanity’s benefit,” Wilkerson writes. Through grueling, humiliating group interrogations they attempted to purge themselves of personality and individualism to create a faultlessly doctrinaire and obedient collective that was as much cult as Communist, the Borg of the revolution. Because traditional relationships might weaken members’ bonds with the collective, they were supposed to have sex only with randomly assigned partners or in cheerless-sounding group orgies.

In early cinema, actors kept a wary eye on the camera. Georges Melies performs magic tricks for us, bowing courteously. From his first appearance in tramp drag, Chaplin flirted with or scowled at the lens, reaching through it to seduce his worshippers out there in the dark.

A Dance to the Music of Time is one of the monuments of 20th-century British literature.

As a monument, it is immediate, cleanly chiseled, foursquare and, despite occasional intricate carvings of angels, stark. As a monument, it does not clearly disclose its sculptor – whether, in this case, it be the author, Anthony Powell, or its universal narrator, Nick Jenkins. And as a monument, at least for me, it is also less “to read” than “to have read.”