Growing Up Underground

A Memoir of Counterculture New York

Steven Heller

• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781648960567
• eBook ISBN:
  9781648961939
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

An entertaining coming-of-age memoir from Steven Heller, award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times. Featuring 100 color photographs, Growing Up Underground takes readers on a visually inspired look back on being at the center of New York's youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s.
 
Steven Heller's memoir is no chronological trek through the hills and valleys of his comparatively "normal" life, but instead, a coming-of-age tale whereby, with luck and circumstance, he found himself in curious and remarkable places at critical times during the 1960s and ‘70s in New York City.
 
Heller's delightful account of his life between the ages of 16 and 26 shows his ambitious journey from the start of his illustrious career as a graphic designer, cartoonist, and writer. Follow his journey through stints at the New York Review of Sex, Screw, and the New York Free Press, until he became the youngest art director (and occasional illustrator) for the New York Times Op-Ed page at age twenty-three.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Prologue: Pronouns: Me/Me/Me
• Introduction: How to Read This Book
• One: To Begin With
• Two: The Appointment Baby
• Three: Good and Bad Hair Days
• Four: The Impossible Dream
• Five: My Mentor
• Six: Al Goldstein, Pornosatirista
• Seven: Brush with Genius
• Eight: Growing Up Underground
• Nine: I Was a Seventeen-Year-Old Pornographer
• Ten: The Mob Boss
• Eleven: My Other Mentor
• Twelve: An Evergreen Memory
• Thirteen: A Warhol Minute
• Fourteen: I Am Not a Punk
• Fifteen: My Times
• Acknowledgments