At the Center explores the mode of perception and reflection which grasped at consensus and sought to determine "centers" or orienting norms, and prevailed across many registers of thought, imagination, and practice in the 1950s, as well as the varieties of argument and expression that escaped inclusion within coherent wholes. This revisionist account of the long 1950s in American intellectual life is both exciting and timely. Showing how across different domains artists and thinkers sought coherence after depression and war without renouncing their insights into flux and historicity, Borus, Blake and Brick make clear that the boundary to the experimentation and upheaval of the 1960s was much more porous than usually thought. Without apologizing for its limitations, they have saved a pregnant era from the condescension of posterity.