Still, Talese was more impressed by the vast changes that had altered the consciousness of the American middle class since his graduation from college and while there were many people in the 1970s who were hopefully predicting a return to the more conservative 1950s, Talese doubted that such was possible. The Reader’s Digest was unquestionably thriving in America and though the national divorce rate was higher than ever, so was the rate of remarriage. Constantly throughout his travels he reminded himself that, despite the social and scientific changes relevant to the Sexual Revolution-the Pill, abortion reform, and the legal restraints against censorship-there were millions of Americans whose favorite book remained the Bible, whose marriages were unadulterous, whose daughters in college were still virgins. In such places, and after lengthy conversations with such people, Talese sensed that normal American family life and traditions were enduring on the surface but in private were being pondered and reappraised. He also observed young couples with children and station wagons driving into shopping centers solid Rotarians and Kiwanians wearing flamboyant satin shirts, hurling bowling balls down narrow glistening lanes freckled country women in curlers checking Gothic novels out of high school libraries suntanned suburbanites playing mixed doubles on tennis courts members of the Pepsi Generation singing in the church choir on Sundays. At night he lingered in the lobbies of the Holiday Inns, the Ramadas, and other motels watching as the gray-suited men with attaché cases purchased at the newsstand a copy of Playboy or Penthouse before heading up to their rooms. Penney to the local massage parlor and X-rated theater.

During the day he strolled through the business districts, noting the close proximity of Woolworth’s and J. He spent weeks in West Virginia and Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and then down into the Bible Belt, where he attended church sermons and town meetings, eavesdropped in cocktail bars, visited precinct houses as well as the tenderloin areas. After returning from Europe, Talese continued his survey of America by traveling into the interior, interviewing ordinary men and women as well as civic leaders and local celebrities he spoke with admittedly monogamous couples and acknowledged swingers, with prosecutors and defense attorneys, theologians and marriage counselors.

Diane webber sand dune