During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock'n' roll invasion, the arrival of works by Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation.