It was the year the Soviets launched the Sputnik rocket into space, and everything changed. In literature, too, momentous things were happening, notes Edward J. Renehan in an essay on his website called “The Fabled Damned: American Literature in 1957.” As Renehan notes, it was the year Robert Frost andErnest Hemingway tried to get Ezra Pound out of a mental institution, the year Jack Kerouacpublished On The Road (which Truman Capote, working on Breakfast at Tiffany’s, said was not writing but “typing”), and that John Cheever published his first novel, and that Allen Ginsberg‘s Howl was confiscated by officials in San Francisco, who tried to prosecute publisher Laurence Ferlinghetti, and that Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged and that — well, it was a big year.