Overview
A day-to-day narrative of one chaotic week at Notre Dame when college students, talented authors, and presidential candidates grappled with major events, creating one of the most historic literary festivals of the twentieth century
One Week in America is a day-by-day narrative of the 1968 Notre Dame Sophomore Literary Festival and the national events that grabbed the spotlight. Dealing with the anti–Vietnam War movement, Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., author Patrick Parr takes readers back to one chaotic week on the Notre Dame campus, when college students, talented authors, and presidential candidates grappled with major events, creating one of the most historic festivals of the twentieth century. The major players in this story are names that just about every household in the United States had heard of before. Those who weren’t interested in William F. Buckley Jr. may have enjoyed Norman Mailer. Voters frustrated with Lyndon B. Johnson had turned their attention to Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, or Martin Luther King Jr. The disaffected youth who believed it was all noise, madness, and lunacy, clung to novelists Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. And those who preferred steady, practical, understated voices read the works of Granville Hicks and Wright Morris. For those disconnected from America, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was there for empathy and inspiration. And yet, this luminary-filled literature festival started with a budget of $2.72. It was only through the thrilling efforts of festival chairman John E. Mroz and a hodgepodge of Notre Dame sophomores that such an event took place. Thanks to them, sixties politics and literature converged amid the chaos of a changing nation.
Reviews
“Masterfully researched and beautifully written, One Week in America is . . . an important piece of history full of larger-than-life characters and unlikely heroes.” —Jonathan Eig, author of Ali: A Life
“Patrick Parr perfectly captures a unique moment in American history, when a motley group of college kids convinced America’s leading literary lights to come together for one memorable week in 1968. You’ll wonder if it really happened, but it did, and One Week in America rescues this incredible story from obscurity.” —Matthew Algeo, author of All This Marvelous Potential: Robert Kennedy’s 1968 Tour of Appalachia
“Completely absorbing, One Week in America deftly illuminates one of the most consequential weeks in our history through cinematic storytelling that feels as much viewed as read. This is the way the best stories resonate, they leave us trembling as if we were actual witnesses to the original events and had merely forgotten we were present.” —W. Jason Miller, author of
Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and
King’s Rhetoric “In One Week in America, Patrick Parr has written an a wonderfully nuanced and essential cultural history. By closely examining the Symposium of Great American Writers at Notre Dame, which took place amid one of the most eventful, tragic weeks in our history, Parr illuminates that time in unexpected and fascinating ways. I tore through this book of conflicting personalities and ideas, and can’t recommend it more highly.” —Peter Orner, author of
Maggie Brown & Others "One Week in America is an engaging, multidimensional snapshot of US society in 1968. It's certainly a resource you wish to research the civil rights movement, antiwar activism, and the literary scene in America in the '60's. It's also fascinating to the general reader interested in modern history, presented from many angles." —PopMatters
“An inherently fascinating bit of American cultural history.” —
Midwest Book ReviewAuthor Biography
Patrick Parr is the author of The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age, and a history columnist for Japan Today. Other work has appeared in The Atlantic, Politico, American History Magazine, and the Boston Globe. In 2014 he was awarded an Artist Trust Fellowship for his literary career.
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