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In 1966, William Gedney received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for a project to make "Photographic Studies of American Life." Toward the end of that year, after traveling and photographing throughout the United States, Gedney arrived in San Francisco, then the mecca for America's radical youth. Gedney soon took up with a group of young hippies, and followed and photographed them for several months as they moved from one vacant apartment to another. In his notebooks Gedney speculates about the motivations for this counterculture movement, the reasons for their indolent lifestyle and rejection of traditional values. Twenty-two of Gedney's photographs from San Francisco were included in his one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (December 1968 through March 1969). Later in 1969, Gedney completed a book dummy of his San Francisco photographs, titling it, "A Time of Youth," and in the notebooks he wrote at length about his methods of selecting and sequencing the images included in the book dummy. "A Time of Youth" was never published.

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