Written in two separate voices, here is Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan’s double memoir: a candid, anecdotal account of two children of privilege, one from New York’s East Side, the other from the West Side, who came of age in the transformative 1950s. Bernays and Kaplan re-create the excitement and dark edges of life in a burgeoning postwar New York: the challenges of new careers in publishing and writing, married life, apartment living, parenting—set against growing sexual and social freedoms, and the shadows of McCarthyism and the Cold War.

Throughout they offer insight into the literary and artistic community of the time and some of its luminaries—Somerset Maugham, Marlene Dietrich, and Anatole Broyard, among others. An intellectual yet deeply intimate meeting of hearts and minds, Back Then portrays an influential couple and their lives, shaped in an era long gone.