Archive of Andy Merrifield

No past revolution, she says, can be attributed to professional revolutionaries. Usually it was the other way around: “revolution broke out and liberated, as it were, the professional revolutionaries from wherever they happened to be – from jail, or from the coffee house, or from the library.”

Five great amateurs whose work changed the world, from author of The Amateur, Andy Merrifield. 

The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love is 40% off, included free bundled ebook, until Sunday, June 18 at midnight UTC. Click here to access the discount.

This year sees the Golden Jubilee of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both are darkly pessimistic texts that speak to our times. They pinpoint the shortcomings of the 1960s generation as much as embody its utopian desires. They transmit a strange optimism, a backdoor sense of hope, and offer another take on what our lives might be.

In this essay Andy Merrifield, author of The Amateur, looks at the importance of these texts on their 50th Anniversary.