The Last Great Dream

How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties

By: Dennis McNally

Few cities represent the countercultural movement of the 1960s more than San Francisco. By the 1950s, the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was home to several hundred colorful refugees from the conventional, self-branded “freaks” (dubbed “hippies” by the media) who created the world’s first psychedelic neighborhood, an alchemical chamber for social transformation. Collectively, these freaks rejected a large part of the mythology underlying the traditional American identity, passing over American exceptionalism, consumerism, misogyny, and militarism in favor of creativity, mind-body connection, peace, and love of all things—humans, animals, and nature alike.

Dennis McNally is the author of the New York Times bestseller A Long, Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead is a consummate historian of the counterculture. He knows the big picture of the American bohemian tradition going back a century with a depth that is unrivaled. In THE LAST GREAT DREAM, his accessible, often riveting scholarship establishes a multi-disciplinary aesthetic, populated by some of the most colorful and trailblazing characters of these times, from Allen Ginsberg to John Cage to Judith Malina and Julian Beck of the Living Theater, to Lenny Bruce, to Ken Kesey, and scores of lesser-known yet key names. It is a who’s who of the courageous pioneers who changed America forever without spilling a drop of blood. While all of these various strands have been written about before, none of their stories have been pulled together into a larger, expansive, more connected picture in the manner that Dennis McNally accomplishes with this definitive book.

THE LAST GREAT DREAM is a history of everything that led to the 1960s counterculture, when long-simmering resistance to American mainstream values birthed the hippie. It begins with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, peaks with the Human Be-in in Golden Gate Park, and ends with the Monterey Pop Festival that introduced Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to the World. It ties everything together into a gripping narrative with a cast of scores of fascinating people, and tells several micro-histories in the process, including beat poetry, visual arts, underground publishing, electronic / contemporary compositional music, experimental theater, psychedelics, and more.

Fascinating, far-reaching, and definitive, THE LAST GREAT DREAM is the ultimate guide to a generation-defining countercultural movement, an Underground 101 course for newcomers and aficionados alike.

©2025 Dennis McNally (P)2025 Hachette Books