The Wandering Years

Before Hip Hop. Before High Times. Before Art After Midnight. There were the letters.

The Wandering Years: Letters from Everywhere is the true story of a generation that came of age after the sixties, told in the words of the people who lived it. For more than twenty years, Steven Hager kept every letter he received. They begin with his boyhood summers in Hepler, Kansas, in the early 1960s and run to his first years as a reporter in New York City. More than 450 of them survive, and they're printed here in full and in order. Postmarks, envelopes, drawings and photographs from the letters run alongside the text.

The letters follow Hager from Urbana, Illinois, to Oakland and Valparaiso. From there he went to Stockholm to avoid the draft, then to a chickee in the Florida Keys, a boarding house on Bruce Avenue in San Francisco, and back to the university town where it all started. Finally he left for New York.

Along the way a cast of unforgettable correspondents comes into focus. Bugsy is the brilliant troublemaker whose letters arrive from a federal prison camp. Carole, Larry and Sybil write about love, drugs, politics and survival in the Midwest. Cousin Tom sends dispatches from Laos, Bangkok, Sydney and the beach at Delray. His mother keeps asking him to write home, and his father sends news of a university career. The editors of Penthouse, The New Yorker and Harper's mail rejection slips until the doors finally begin to open. Joseph Heller, Thomas Williams and Rene Ricard turn up too.

The letters are funny, heartbreaking, profane and often wildly wrong about the future. Together they read like a novel nobody meant to write, a portrait of the restless years between Woodstock and the birth of hip hop.

The book opens with a 1988 conversation between the author and his mother. It closes with "Where Are They Now," short notes on what became of the people in these pages, and an index of names.

Steven Hager started The Tin Whistle, one of the first underground newspapers in downstate Illinois, in 1968. In 1979 he moved to New York, where he reported for the Daily News and the Village Voice. He wrote the first history of hip hop and the first book on Basquiat, Haring and Scharf, and he originated the film that became Beat Street. As editor of High Times he created the Cannabis Cup. He lives in Highlands, New Jersey.