The Haight-Ashbury

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the San Francisco scene, the legendary and critically acclaimed history of that time is again in print

The psychedelic community of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district was probably the most widely written-about phenomenon of the 1960s apart from the Vietnam War. But the people who wrote about it were either outsiders who knew nothing about how it arose -- the whole event, from first public manifestation to gaudy collapse -- or participants clumsily trying to put a shiny gloss on those psychedelic times. How the Haight arose was, in fact, the secret of its mysterious energy, because it was a gripping drama, at the same time unexpected and awesomely inevitable. First published by Rolling Stone twenty years ago, this book was the first to establish what really happened there and to give an understanding of the event. It remains the definitive book on Haight Ashbury.

Charles Perry was born and raised in Los Angeles and majored in Middle Eastern Studies at Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he discovered psychedelics and thereafter keenly followed the growth of the counter-culture that blossomed quickly in the Bay Area in 1965. In 1968, he began working as an editor and writer for Rolling Stone (then publishing its 12th issue). It was during this time that he researched and wrote his history of Haight-Ashbury. In 1979, Perry moved to Los Angeles and became a freelance food writer. Today he is internationally known as one of the leading authorities on the history of Middle Eastern food.