Anecdotal, funny, frank, POPism is Warhol's personal view of the Pop phenomenon in New York in the 1960s. A cultural storm swept through the 1960s—Pop Art, Bob Dylan, psychedelia, underground movies—and at its center sat a bemused young artist with silver hair: Andy Warhol. Andy knew everybody (from the cultural commissioner of New York to drug-driven drag queens) and everybody knew Andy. His studio, the Factory, was the place: where he created the large canvases of soup cans and Pop icons that defined Pop Art, where one could listen to the Velvet Underground and rub elbows with Edie Sedgwick and where Warhol himself could observe the comings and goings of the avant-garde. In the detached, back-fence gossip style he was famous for, Warhol tells all in POPism —the ultimate inside story of a decade of cultural revolution. PRAISE FOR POPISM "A vivid re-creation of a great time to live and a great time to die."--Martin Scorsese "It is as absorbing as the best telephone gossip, funny yet full of insights."?Christopher Isherwood   A cultural storm swept through the 1960s?Pop Art, Bob Dylan, psychedelia, happenings, underground movies, the British Invasion?and at its center sat a bemused young artist with silver hair: Andy Warhol. Andy knew everybody?from the cultural commissioner of New York to drug-driven drag queens?and everybody knew Andy. His studio, The Factory, was the place: where he created the large canvases of soup cans and Pop icons that defined Pop Art, where one could listen to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and rub elbows with Edie Sedgwick, where The Chelsea Girls and Warhol’s other underground classics were shot, and where Warhol himself could observe the comings and goings of the avant garde. Anecdotal, funny, and frank, POPism is where Warhol tells it all?the ultimate inside story of a decade of cultural revolution.   " POPism reads like a novel . . . Social history of the rarest kind, set down in ultra-sharp focus by someone who helped shape the events he describes."?Calvin Tomkins, The New Yorker   Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was a painter, graphic artist, filmmaker, and leader of the Pop Art movement. He was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and died in New York in 1987.   Pat Hackett worked closely with Andy Warhol for twenty years, coauthoring two books and a screenplay as well as serving as his diarist. Andy Warhol was a legendary painter and graphic artist, known for pioneering the genre of pop art. He also produced a significant body boundary-pushing films, including his famous  Chelsea Girls.  A well-known socialite of the 60's and 70's, Warhol was the resident host at his studio, The Factory, where one could listen to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and rub elbows with Edie Sedgwick. Warhol died in New York in 1987.    1960– 1963 If I’d gone ahead and died ten years ago, I’d probably be a cult figure today. By 1960, when Pop Art first came out in New York, the art scene here had so much going for it that even all the stiff European types had to finally admit we were a part of world culture. Abstract Expressionism had already become an institution, and then, in the last part of the fifties, Jasper Johns and Bob Rauschenberg and others had begun to bring art back from abstraction and introspective stuff. Then Pop Art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside. The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second—comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles—all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all. One of the phenomenal things about the Pop painters is that they were already painting alike when they met. My friend Henry Geldzahler, curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum before he was appointed official culture czar of New York, once described the beginnings of Pop this way: “It was like a science fiction movie—you Pop artists in different parts of the city, unknown to each other, rising up out of the muck and staggering forward with your paintings in front of you.” The person I got my art training from was Emile de Antonio—when I first met De, I was a commercial artist. In the sixties De became known for his films on Nixon and McCarthy, but back in the fifties he was an artists’ agent. He connected artists with everything from neighborhood movie houses to department stores and huge corporations. But he only worked with friends; if De didn’t like you, he couldn’t be bothered. De was the first person I know of to see commercial art as real art and real art as commercial art, and he made the whole New York art world see it that way, too. In the fifties John Cage lived near De in the country, up in Pomona, and they’d gotten to be good friends. De produced a concert of John’s there, and that’s how he first met Jasper Johns and Bob Rauschenberg. “They were b