In the gigantic edition of "The complete cartoons of the New Yorker" Ed. R. Mankoff, 2004, introducing the illustrations that correspond to The Fourth Decade (1955-1964), John Updike wrote:

 

" There were stirrings even under the anodyne Eisenhower. In popular culture, early rock drowned our mellow remnants of the big-band era; in painting, the stern and heroic canvases of Abstract Expressionism morphed into the cheerful junk art of Pop art and the deadpan quiddity of Minimalism; in writing, baroque mandarins such as Bellow and Nabokov added new, ligther notes to the sonorities of our native naturalism.  A certain lightness and gaiety, indeed, permeated the décor and the mindset of a hardworking land.... The magnitude of free-world leadership weighed on the collective mind: "The Russians have the Intercontinental Ballistic missile, and we have the Edsel."