The 1950s are enshrined in the popular imagination as the decade of poodle skirts and "I Like Ike." But this was also a complex time, in which the afterglow of Total Victory in World War II gave way to Cold War paranoia, the Suez Crisis, and H-bomb tests. The 50s also marked the cultural emergence of extraordinary new talents, from Thelonious Monk to Sylvia Plath and Tennessee Williams. This time capsule from The New Yorker includes outstanding period contributions by Elizabeth Bishop, Roald Dahl, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Nadine Gordimer, A.J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, Vladimir Nabokov, Lillian Ross, John Updike, and E.B. White, as well as latter-day perspectives by Jonathan Franzen, Adam Gopnik, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Jill Lepore.