Your dad orchestrated a transfer. In the middle of your junior year you transferred to Walden where Neil Shevelin, your art teacher, liked your work. I understand that his encouragement gave you the courage to begin to show your portfolio to several underground newspaper art editors. And I noticed that you got a very different response from those editors and art directors. What gave you the sense, like how did you even know about these underground newspapers? When he was 15 or so, I saw on the newsstand a cover of the East Village Other. It was just the kind of humor that I needed.
Steven Heller—legendary writer and author—joins to discuss his new book “Growing Up Underground,” an entertaining and humorous coming-of-age story at the center of New York’s youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s.