Read more from Tom Hayden on the 40th anniversary of the massive antiwar protests outside the 1968 DNC and the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial that followed in Voices of the Chicago 8: A Generation on Trial


For the last fifty years, Tom Hayden has been an outspoken advocate for civil rights, social justice, environmental protection and peace. He has also been a prolific writer, documenting and exploring a profound and constant search for alternatives to the injustices of modern America.

It was Martin Luther King who first encouraged Hayden, a young writer, to cross the line from observation to direct action. In Writings for a Democratic Society, a collection of Hayden’s essential political, personal, and cultural writings spanning his fifty years of active political life, we see him crossing that line over and over. From his earliest days as a Freedom Rider in the segregated South to his involvement in the street protests of 1968; from his years on the forefront of the anti-Vietnam War movement to his many years of service as a California state legislator, Tom Hayden’s writings celebrate and affirm an alternative American experience and constitute nothing less than a history of our times.

Tom Hayden is the author of many books including Street Wars, Irish on the Inside, The Lost Gospel of Earth, and Ending the War in Iraq. He serves on the editorial board of The Nation, and has lived in the Los Angeles area since 1971.

Praise for Tom Hayden:

“Tom Hayden changed America. Before him, nobody saw the possibility of a political movement based on the middle-class college student’s quest for meaning in life. Hayden brought this movement to life, so was father to the largest mass protests in American history, whose reverberations we are still feeling today.”
—The Atlantic

"One comes away enthralled by Hayden's odyssey."
– The Boston Sunday Globe