If ever you’re looking for the time-setting eqivalent of whiplash, I doubt you could do much better than shifting from watching Of Mice and Men to reading Pattern Recognition.
It also raised an interesting (for me) rhetorical question:
What is the shortest time period over the last 100 years which saw the most personal change in the U.S.?
I’m leaning towards thinking 1935-1946, largely for the personal wealth and relative safety that was, er, fashionable at the time.