Available From UC Press

Self-Realization Nation

How Artists of the Creative Counterculture Made a New America

John Kapusta

The story of an unexpected group of performing artists who led one of the most influential artistic movements in contemporary American history.

After World War II, personal fulfillment emerged as a defining American cultural ideal. Self-realization—the quest to become our authentic selves—remains a powerful part of American culture and arts today.

In Self-Realization Nation, John Kapusta provides a lively cultural history of how an overlooked movement of musicians, dancers, and actors championed the ideal of self-realization. These performers, who spanned many backgrounds, identities, genres, and artistic styles, became what he calls the creative counterculture. Artists as varied as Sonny Rollins, John Cage, Anna Halprin, Alice and John Coltrane, and Pauline Oliveros shared an approach to creativity focused on letting go of limiting beliefs and subverting oppressive social norms. Through colorful vignettes, Kapusta reveals how these artists made their art and how their approach spread beyond the performing arts to influence such fields as psychology, education, and wellness. Ultimately, these creative counterculturists came to define a new vision of an America where everyone was free to be themselves, together.

John Kapusta is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.

"In this well-written and fascinating book, John Kapusta investigates a seldom-discussed topic: the impact the self-realization movement had on the arts, especially music. Kapusta weaves together strands from music, dance, art, literature, and psychology into a broad and compelling narrative that provides many new insights into late twentieth-century American culture."—Michael Broyles, author of Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades That Changed a Country and Its Sounds

"Self-Realization Nation invites readers to breathe along with the ideas, performances, and people at the heart of Kapusta's elegant, sensitive, and rigorous study. Articulating bold new connections between what might sound like otherwise disconnected musical worlds, he brings to life the tensions and ideals that led musicians to imagine artistic practice as a path to self-realization."—Andrea F. Bohlman, author of Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland

"This compelling and revelatory book offers a glimpse of a creative counterculture that has too often been overshadowed by inaccurate clichés of drugged-out hippies and reckless radical politics. Kapusta uses fresh archival sources to turn our attention to a lively and diverse array of artists—including John and Alice Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Joseph Jarman, John Cage, Kay Ortmans, George Rochberg, Pauline Oliveros, James Woods, Anna Halprin, Studio Watts, James Xavier Nash, Al Huang, and others—who sought to link self-realization to collective transformation through letting go, tuning in to nature, and embracing spontaneity, improvisation, and chance. Self-Realization Nation offers an important intervention into how we remember the artistic side of the counterculture of the 1960s and '70s, and what this memory has to offer artists and citizens of today who are looking for more sustainable and fulfilling modes of liberation."—Michael Kramer, author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture

"Kapusta has excavated the obscured metaphysical strata of postwar music he calls the 'creative counterculture.' With a narrative that entangles nearly every genre of musical life—from children's music to the Grateful Dead—he leaves no part of US culture untouched. Self-Realization Nation is a risky, bold book for our era of irreconcilable differences. That Kapusta has recovered a set of shared values across US musical culture is a testament to his hopeful vision for what musicology can achieve."—Ryan Dohoney, author of Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde

"Kapusta's brilliantly conceived and elegantly written work on the creative counterculture of the post–World War II decades reveals how an extraordinary group of artists and musicians found freedom and fulfillment by letting go and embracing the possibilities of self-realization. In our harrowing times, their creative lives resonate and inspire."—David Farber, author of The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s

"Here is a powerful new book that both recounts and performs the creative counterculture across a broad spectrum of communities and peoples of color as a long-standing ideal of America and democracy itself. Here are the arts not only as representation or expression but as a means of protest and liberation, a political-spiritual work of the self-realized."—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

304 pp.6 x 9Illus: 14 b/w figures, 8 music examples

9780520427280$95.00|£80.00Hardcover

May 2026