IT PROBABLY STARTED for me around the end of the 1950s, let’s say 1959. I was twelve. Sitting in my room in my family’s ranch house in suburban New Jersey, I picked up John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and made the connection between poverty and exploitation. Also, the connection with Woody Guthrie’s “Dust Bowl Refugee,” “Pastures of Plenty,” and the left-wing folk revival taking off at that time, busting through AM radio onto our 33 1/3 LP turntables.

Six years later, in 1965, the US had just invaded Vietnam with main-force troops, Malcolm X had been assassinated, and I was a freshman at