One youth movement that is focused in Little Brother is the Free Speech Movement. This youth movement was pivotal in the civil liberties movement in the sixties and was overall a great success. Now, I found it interesting that Doctorow would include such a successful and famous movement in a book where ultimately his characters performing the revolt end up failing. At a second glance, I realized that it was not whether or not they failed, but what they were fighting for. The youth in Berkeley were fighting for free speech, and the characters in the book were fighting for the same thing. Free speech is an important topic to Doctorow, and he makes this especially clear by basing a large portion of his novel around the fact that Marcus is simply trying to get his own point of view out to a crowd that is doing everything in their power to silence him.