William L. O'Neill was an historian specializing in 20th century America. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan and his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the universities of Pittsburgh, Colorado and Wisconsin before accepting a position at Rutgers University in 1971, where he taught until his retirement in 2006.

William L. O'Neill's masterly chronicle of the twentieth century's most confounding decade is an immensely readable book that combines wit with learning and seriousness with entertainment. Its emphasis is inevitably on politics, but it offers a brilliant yet balanced portrayal of the New Left, the counterculture, the civil rights movement, the plunge into Vietnam, the crisis in the universities, and the freakier aspects of the popular culture. It has endured as one of the great interpretations of the sixties.