The Sixties Diary

The Sixties Diary depicts my experience during the Summer of Love and continues into the anti-war movement.

I began the diary in a 96-page copybook several days after I arrived in San Francisco to start my graduate degree in creative writing at San Francisco State.

All this fit the literary life I hoped to begin rather than the voyage I was about to embark on.

The excitement was irresistible. I was 22 and ready for changes. It was fun, terrifying, sexy, crazed.

Filled with acid trips, drug dealers, Draft dodgers, runaways, Hare Krishnas, Hell's Angels, gangsters, Black Panthers, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and the Jefferson Airplane, the love story at the core of the diary, along with letters from a cousin in Vietnam, display the range of passions young people faced at the time.

Periodic references to the number of war dead, accelerating Draft calls, riots in the cities, the Six-Day War -- all suggest a world coming apart at the seams.

But for one brief moment the Summer of Love sprang forth.