Fifty who made the difference

Trailblazers - extending our horizons : The summer before Salk / Charles L. Mee Jr. --

Alfred Kinsey : the patron saint of sex / Stanley Elkin --

Is there any end to Kerouac Highway? / Ken Kesey --

Nixon without knives / Gore Vidal --

Oswald Avery and the cascade of surprises / Lewis Thomas --

And playing second base for Brooklyn... Jackie Robinson / Wilfrid Sheed --

George Gallup's nation of numbers / Richard Reeve --

Dr. Rock's magic pill / Sara Davidson --

Neil Armstrong's famous first words / George Plimpton.

Legends - the real and the mythic : The short, classy voyage of JFK / William Styron --

Muhammad Ali is the most famous man in the world / Bob Greene --

Hey, hey LBJ / Tom Wicker --

Uncle Walt / Max Apple --

Elvis! / Roy Blount Jr. --

Jackie, the prisoner of celebrity / Norman Mailer.

Builders - architects of the enduring : Thomas Watson's principles of modern management / Peter F. Drucker --

Acheson at the creation / Ronald Steel --

Behold the Brothers Rockefeller, bearing gifts / Adam Smith --

Dorothy Day at the barricades / Garry Wills --

The ambivalence of J. Robert Oppenheimer / Murray Kempton --

The life and time of Henry Luce / William F, Buckley --

John L. Lewis, union general / Victor Navasky --

Philip Johnson : the man in the glass house / Tom Buckley --

What hath William Paley wrought? / David McClintick.

Visionaries - taking the long, sharp view : Martin Luther King, American preacher / David Halberstam --

The last years of Tennessee Williams / Dotson Rader --

Abraham Maslow and the new self / George Leonard --

Ray Kroc did it all for you / Tom Robbins --

The tinkerings of Robert Noyce / Tom Wolfe --

The house that Levitt built / Ron Rosenbaum --

The political conscience of Reinhold Niebuhr / Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. --

What Alfred Barr saw / Robert Hughes --

The cowboy hero and the American West...as directed by John Ford / Peter Bogdanovich.

Advocates - the strength to persevere : Edmund Wilson and the landscape of literature / John Updike --

The case of Earl Warren v. Earl Warren / Frances FitzGerald --

The unknown nonsoldier / Peter Davis --

The night Ed Murrow struck back / Arthur Miller --

The flight of Rachel Carson / Geoffrey Norman --

Ralph Nader, public eye / Ken Auletta --

My hero, Malcolm X / David Bradley --

Back on the beat with Woodward and Bernstein / Steven Brill --

The emancipation of Betty Friedan / Marilyn French --

Benjamin Spock's baby bible / Harry Stein.

Champions - setting the standards : In the days of Mr. Roosevelt / Saul Bellow --

Eleanor the good / John Kenneth Galbraith --

Jack the Dripper / Kurt Vonnegut Jr. --

The Grand Duke of Jazz / Alistair Cooke --

Ike and the Generals / James Salter --

Hepburn in Autumn / Truman Capote --

The three kings : Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald / Richard Ford.

Epilogues - the nameless, the faceless, the millions : The common man / Irwin Shaw --

The war hero / Thomas B. Morgan --

The emigre / Elizabeth Hardwick.