Fiction
On the Road: The Original Scroll by
The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published as Kerouac originally composed it IN THREE WEEKS in April of 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his first full draft of On the Road--typed as a single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper, which he later taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. A major literary event when it was published in Viking hardcover in 2007, this is the uncut version of an American classic--rougher, wilder, and more provocative than the official work that appeared, heavily edited, in 1957. This version, capturing a moment in creative history, represents the first full expression of Kerouac's revolutionary aesthetic. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Call Number: General Collection PS3521.E735 O5 2007Publication Date: 2008 (On the Road originally published 1957)
Vanity of Duluoz by
Written in 1967 from the vantage point of the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man Originally subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946," Vanity of Duluoz presents the formative years in the life of Jack Duluoz--Kerouac's alter ego--beginning with his high school experiences as a sporting jock in small-town New England and his time at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Just as Jack's glamorous new adult life begins, so does World War II, and he joins the US Navy to travel the world. The more he experiences, the more he realizes the limits of his former plans, and decides to and return to New York, where he collides with the start of the Beat movement, and a riot of drugs, sex and writing. Vanity of Duluoz was Kerouac's final work published before his death in 1969.
Call Number: General Collection PS3521.E735 V3 1994Publication Date: 1967
Naked Lunch by
Narcotics addict Bill Lee travels in search of drugs and eventually descends into the nightmarish fantasy world of Interzone.
Call Number: General Collection PS3552.U75 N3 1992Publication Date: 1959
Ghost of Chance by
Ghost of Chance is an adventure story set in the jungle of Madagascar and filled with the obsessions that mark the work of the man who Norman Mailer once called, "the only American writer possessed by genius." While tripping through the author's trademark concerns - drugs, paranoia, and lemurs, this short novel tells an important story about environmental devastation in a way that only Burroughs can tell it.
Call Number: General Collection PS3552.U75 G48 1995Publication Date: 1995
The First Third and Other Writings by
The posthumously published autobiographical novel by Neal Cassady, immortalized as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's own autobiographical novel, On the Road. Neal Cassady was infamous for his unstoppable energy and his overwhelming charm, his savvy hustle and his devil-may-care attitude. A treasured friend and traveling companion of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Ken Kesey, to name just some of his cohorts on the beatnik path, Cassady lived life to the fullest, ready for inspiration at any turn. Before he died in Mexico in 1968, just four days shy of his forty-second birthday, Cassady had written the jacket blurb for this book: "Seldom has there been a story of a man so balled up. No doubt many readers will not believe the veracity of the author, but I assure these doubting Thomases that every incident, as such, is true." As Ferlinghetti writes in his editor's note, Cassady was "an early prototype of the urban cowboy who a hundred years ago might have been an outlaw on the range." Here are his autobiographical writings, the rambling American saga of a truly free individual. Neal Cassady (1926-1968) was a key figure and writer during the Beat Generation and is known as the inspiration for Jack Kerouac's immortalizing character Dean Moriarty. In 1946, Cassady traveled to New York City where he met famous Beat poets and writers such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Cassady's works were never published during his lifetime.
Call Number: General Collection CT275.C3458 A3 1981Publication Date: 2001 (The First Third originally published 1971)
Go by
Generally acknowledged to be the first Beat novel, go was originally published in 1952, five years before Kerouac's On the Road. John Clellon Holmes became the Beat Generation's chief chronicler.--Newsweek.
Call Number: General Collection PS3558.O3594 G6 1997ISBN: 1560251441Publication Date: 1952
Love in the Days of Rage by
This poetic novel about love in a time of revolution and change, from one of the most influential literary figures of modern times, is a work of lyricism, commitment, painting, politics, passion and intellect. Set in Paris in May of 1968, revolution and love are in the air as the love between a young American Painter and her Portuguese lover, a banker and anarchist, unfolds against those heady days when students of the Sorbonne tried to find common cause with workers who despised them, and Annie's passion for the world meets Julian's disdain for the human race.
Call Number: General Collection PS3511.E557 L59 2001Publication Date: 2001
In the Night Café by
Amid the 1960s Greenwich Village art scene, Joanna falls in love with painter Tom, who has abandoned his wife and children.
Call Number: General Collection PS3560.O3795 I5 1989Publication Date: 1990
The Fiction of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka by
Here, for the first time under one cover, is the collected fiction of one of America's greatest writers. LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, may be most famous for his plays, poetry, and music writings; nut his one published novel, The System of Dante's Hell (1965), his book of short stories, Tales (1967), and his previously unpublished novel 6 Persons (1973-74) give ample evidence that his fiction may even exceed his other work in complexity, invention, confessional recklessness, and contribution to issues of black identity. This volume includes all three of these masterpieces, and supplements them with four previously uncollected stories. Jones's fiction, which shares the acute self-consciousness, autobiographical tendencies, and restlessness of Beat writing, also maintains an uncompromising attitude towards sex and violence: The System of Dante's Hell was banned when first published because of its graphic depiction of homosexual acts. Poetic, provocative, witty, bitter, and aggressive, this book contains some of the most astonishing writing to emerge from a convulsive periods in African American history
Call Number: General Collection PS3552.A583 A6 2000BPublication Date: 2000
Poetry
Book of Blues by
Best known for his "Legend of Duluoz" novels, including On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these eight extended poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect in Mexico City Blues, his largely unheralded classic of postmodern literature. Edited by Kerouac himself, Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment. "In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musicians spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses." --Jack Kerouac
Call Number: General Collection PS3521.E735 B55 1995Publication Date: 1995Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts & Bibliography by Thirty years after the groundbreaking and controversial publication of Ginsberg's Howl, Harper & Row presents this detailed, annotated edition.
Call Number: General Collection PS3513.I74 H6 1986Publication Date: 1986 ("Howl" originally published 1956)
Collected Poems, 1947-1997 by
"Taken all together, Ginsberg's poems are X-rays of a considerable part of American society during the last four decades." -- The New Yorker This magnificent volume gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half-century of brilliant work from one of America's great poets. A chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg changed the course of American poetry, liberating it from closed academic forms with the creation of open, vocal, spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse in the tradition of Whitman, Apollinaire, Hart Crane, Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg's raw tones and attitudes of spiritual liberation also helped catalyze a psychological revolution that has become a permanent part of our cultural heritage, profoundly influencing not only poetry and popular song and speech, but also our views of the world.
Call Number: General Collection PS3513 .I74 2006Publication Date: 2006
Danger on Peaks: Poems by
In his first collection of new poems since Axe Handles (1983), Gary Snyder includes fifty-five new poems and prose poems. As longtime readers will recognize, this collection is unique in Snyder's oeuvre, finding the poet experimenting with a wide variety of styles, including an extended foray in the Japanese form haibun, "making it an American form," as the poet remarks. Two sections of poems exploring "intimate immediate life, gossip and insight" are some of the poet's most personal work. Danger on Peaks begins with the poet's first climb of Mount St. Helens on August 13, 1945, and his learning on the morning after his descent about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Again the poet visits Mount St. Helens in 2000 to view the blast site of the 1980 eruption. Then follow poems for the Buddhas of Bamiyan Valley and the World Trade Towers. More than a mere gathering of unrelated poems, Danger on Peaks is a constructed work, where every part contributes to the whole.
Call Number: General Collection PS3569.N88 D36 2004Publication Date: 2004
The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, 1952-1998 by
A monumental collection gathering the essays, travel journals, letters, poems and translations of one of the most influential voices of the 20th century.
Call Number: General Collection PS3569.N88 A6 2000Publication Date: 2000A Coney Island of the Mind by The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's "Into the Night Life" and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's--as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.
Call Number: General Collection PS3511.E557 C6Publication Date: 1958
Drive by
Poetry. African American Studies. "Jones is known best for her resonant memoir about the beat milieu and her marriage to Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), How I Became Hettie Jones (1990), but this collection of poems, her first, will establish her as a potent and fearless poet. The provocative multiplicity of meanings embodied by the title bears beautiful fruit, beginning with a strikingly original set of poems about cars and the road, including 'Hard Drive' in which Jones saucily introduces herself as both 'woman enough to be moved to tears / and man enough / to drive my car in any direction.' She does drive in any and all directions over the course of the book, writing both deeply personal and strongly political poems, all of which are utterly free of sentimentality yet warm with compassion. Jones writes 'I love / everyone today, as usual,' and it is her embracing of life, and its mirror image, death, that revs each poem up to speed, liberating us, for a sweet moment, from inertia"--Donna Seaman, Booklist.
Call Number: General Collection PS3560.O485 D75 1998ISBN: 1882413512Publication Date: 1998
Going On: Selected Poems, 1958-1980 by
A collection of poetry by Joanne Kyger, a poet of the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance.
Call Number: General Collection PS3561.Y35 A6 1983Publication Date: 1983
Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems by
Feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement. There, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara and Audre Lorde. After joining Timothy Leary's intentional community in upstate New York, she moved to San Francisco in 1968. One of her collections of poetry,The Poetry Deal, is also published by City Lights Publishers. Di Prima was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009. She has been awarded the National Poetry Association's Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Committee on Poetry, the Lapis Foundation and the Institute for Aesthetic Development. St. Lawrence University granted her an honorary doctorate.
Call Number: General Collection PS3507.I68 P5 1990Publication Date: 1990
Desert Journal by
Poetry. Drawings by Paul Blake. Originally published in 1977 by Good Gay Poets of Boston. "A book whose page has come. ruth weiss has been sounding these poems, alone or with jazz accompaniment, for many years. It's now ocheny chorosho that they appear for the senses of those potential poets searching for new modulations of expression; for her poems are of the rhythms of our time and the interlaced, repetitive subtleties are sewn by that 'thread for those who breathe in rags' (Vallejo) which bespeaks and sings the deep loom of the bronze lotus."—Jack Hirschman
Call Number: General Collection PS3573.E4164 D4Publication Date: 1977
Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems by
Winner, PEN Center USA West 1997 Literary Award. Finalist, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award. "Straight from some astral plane comes the ghost of this great Beat poet. . . . This is not so much a collection as it is a steam-pipe explosion.--Publishers Weekly Includes a complete bibliography.
Call Number: General Collection PS3561.A84 C73 1996Publication Date: 1996
The Ancient Rain: Poems, 1956-1978 by
The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978 is San Francisco poet Bob Kaufman's third collection and his first to be published since the late 1960s. One of the original Beat poets (the coinage "beatnik" is his), Kaufman's work has always been essentially improvisational, often done to jazz accompaniment. And he became something of a legendary figure at the poetry readings in the early days of the San Francisco renaissance of the 1950s. With his extemporaneous technique, akin in many ways to Surrealist automatic writing, he has produced a body of work ranging from a visionary lyricism infused with satirical, almost Dadaistic elements to a prophetic poetry of political and social protest. Born in New Orleans of mixed Black and Jewish parentage, Kaufman was one of fourteen children. During twenty years in the Merchant Marine, he cultivated an intense taste for literature on his long sea voyages. Settling in California, in the '50s, he became active in the burgeoning West Coast literary scene. Disappointment, drugs, and imprisonment led him to take a ten-year vow of complete silence that lasted until 1973. The present volume includes previously uncollected poems written prior to his pledge and newer work composed in the years 1973-1978, before the poet once again lapsed into silence.
Call Number: General Collection PS3561.A84 A8ISBN: 081120801XPublication Date: 1981
S O S: Poems 1961-2013 by
One of theNew York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books WITH AN APPENDIX OF NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED WORK Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century. This volume comprises the fullest spectrum of his rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to unpublished pieces composed during his final years. Throughout Baraka's career as a prolific writer in several genres (also published under the name LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. His legacy in world literature is matched by his widespread influence as an activist and cultural leader. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by the Black Arts Movement's intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history.
Call Number: General Collection PS3552.A583 A6 2015Publication Date: 2016
Meadowlark West by
This magical poetry creates a contemporary urban bucolic in its electric transitions between city and wilderness, human design and the natural world. Lamantia combines savage satire with a intense lyricism. These poems open the coiled dream door of the labyrinth to apocalyptic terrors, catastrophes of the political world, old myths of the earth, the sublimity of birds, the wild West, the commune of anarchs and the regenerative power of love.
Call Number: General Collection PS3562.A42 M4 1986Publication Date: 1986
Overtime: Selected Poems by
Like his college roommate Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen took both poetry and Zen seriously. He became friends with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Michael McClure, and played a key role in the explosive poetic revolution of the '50s and '60s. Celebrated for his wisdom and good humor, Whalen transformed the poem for a generation. His writing, taken as a whole, forms a monumental stream of consciousness (or, as Whalen calls it, "continuous nerve movie") of a wild, deeply read, and fiercely independent American--one who refuses to belong, who celebrates and glorifies the small beauties to be found everywhere he looks. This long-awaited Selected Poems is a welcome opportunity to hear his influential voice again.
Call Number: General Collection PS3545.H117 A6 1999Publication Date: 1999
The Happy Birthday of Death by
It is true that he has been one of the inner circle of the 'Beats' from the first, but many admirers of his poetry feel that it belongs quite as much to other and older traditions in world literature. One of these is the revival of pure poetry whenever an "original"--be it Rimbaud or Whitman--has broken with current verse conventions to give free rein to the magic of language. Another is that ancient pre-occupation of poets--the sense of the immediacy of death. Like Villon or Dylan Thomas, Corso lives close to the mystery of death. It is, perhaps, his central theme, on which variations ranging from the terrible to the comic are sounded. But Corso is seldom macabre. A bursting vitality always carries him back to the sensations of the living, though always it is the reality behind the obvious which has caught his eye. "How I love to probe life," Corso has written, "That's what poetry is to me, a wondrous prober... It's not the metre or measure of a line, a breath; not 'law' music; but the assembly of great eye sounds placed into an inspired measured idea."
Call Number: General Collection PS3505.O763 H3Publication Date: 1960
A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation by
Both a rediscovery and a celebration, this anthology gathers the beat period writings of 26 women. The work aims to provide a celebration of the female independence of mind and spirit.
Call Number: General Collection PS508.W7 D54 1997Publication Date: 1997
Collections of letters, journals, interviews, personal papers, etc.
Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac by
Empty Phantoms: Collected Interviews with Jack Kerouac gathers together, for the first time in one volume, all known printed, recorded, and filmed interviews--including those celebrated, infamous, or obscure--with the acclaimed American writer and father of the Beats, Jack Kerouac. In many instances, the interviews are transcribed from original tapes and are either unabridged, like the famous "Paris Review" interview in which the journal was excised for space constraints, or unexpurgated, such as in the infamous Northport Library interview, which had been edited to avoid issues of libel and charges of anti-Semitism. Editor Paul Maher, one of the leading young lions of Kerouac scholarship, has scoured newspapers to glean interviews unseen for decades. Although many top-notch journalists, from Mike Wallace to William F. Buckley, conducted the interviews, it is Kerouac who dominates the proceedings, with his energy, wit, passion, anger, astute insights, playfulness, literaryintegrity, and searching spirituality. Best of all, the interviews are replete with Kerouacisms like "walking on water wasn't built in a day, wisdom is heartless," and "pity dogs and forgive men," which have been a cherished aspect of Kerouac's literature. Beyond his own works, this living portrait of Kerouac isn't available anywhere else.
Call Number: General Collection PS3521.E735 Z46 2005Publication Date: 2005
Some of the Dharma by
Offers a collage of poems, haiku, journal entries, letters, meditations, ideas on writing, notes on Buddhism, prayers, blues, and sketches.
Call Number: General Collection BQ4012 .K47 1997Publication Date: 1997
Kerouac and Friends: A Beat Generation Album by
Renowned photographer Fred McDarrah captures the Beats in the midst of their rise to acclaim. His 100 shots of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others partying in cheap downtown Manhattan apartments, socializing at Grove Press book parties, and hunching over their typewriters are joined by writings from a diverse and illuminating raft of sources. Jack Kerouac contributes a list of activities necessary for writing success ("1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy"), Diana Trilling shares her thoughts on her fears of and for husband's former student, Allen Ginsberg, and Mad magazine sends up the young men and women who took up the beat lifestyle Kerouac and friends made famous. Kerouac and Friends is a fresh and surprising look at the young men and women who would come to define the last major epoch in American literature. "A lot of great stuff here about those Abominable Snowmen of modern poetry, the Beats."--Lawrence Ferlinghetti "Not merelya marvelous nostalgia trip. It also illuminates an important period in American culture. First rate!"--Michael Harrington
Call Number: General Collection PS228.B6 K47 2002Publication Date: 2002
Indian Journals, March 1962 - May 1963: Notebooks, Diary, Blank Pages, Writings by
The leading poet of the Beat generation and late-twentieth-century American letters, a spokesman for the antiwar generation, an icon of the counterculture, Allen Ginsberg led a movement that profoundly altered the American literary and cultural landscapes. Indian Journals collects Ginsberg's writing from a 1962-63 stay in India. It is wonderfully far-reaching, imaginative, at times intensely private, and always in possession of a hallucinatory clarity that affirms Ginsberg's truly great ability, as well as his ebullient spirit. Indian Journals took half a decade to transcribe and edit; when it was originally published in 1970 it catalyzed a large movement of young Western pilgrims to explore India and Eastern thought. This perfect combination of text and images, Indian Journals is testimony to Ginsberg's passionate interest in Eastern religion and mysticism and contains the initial ideas that compose some of his greatest poems. Published more than thirty years ago, Ginsberg's intimate writings on India will be reissued in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Howl's publication.
Call Number: General Collection PS3513.I74 Z472 1996Publication Date: 1996
Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996 by
The interviews collected in Spontaneous Mind, chronologically arranged and in some cases previously unpublished, were conducted throughout Allen Ginsberg's long career. Always a candid and engaging subject, Ginsberg considered the interview an art form, as well as an opportunity to get his message across to many people, which, as a student of Eastern religions, he believed was his spiritual obligation. In these interviews, dating from the late 1950s to the mid-1990s, Ginsberg speaks frankly about his life, his work, and the events of his time. Ginsberg's progressive and controversial views on politics and censorship dominate his interviews, from his conversation with the conservative William F. Buckley on PBS to his comments in the Dartmouth Review about U.S. policy in Central America to his testimony at the Chicago Seven trial. Ginsberg discusses his literary influences, including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, and William Blake, and offers insights into his own poetry, particularly his innovations in rhythm, meter, and syllable emphasis. A well-known experimenter with drugs, campaigner for their legalization, and believer in their ability to expand consciousness, Ginsberg here describes his LSD trips and his marijuana highs, and explains how they influenced the creation of "Kaddish" and other works. And he talks about his personal life with candor, revealing details of his sexual affairs with fellow Beats Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, and his longtime relationship with Peter Orlovsky. Provocative and illuminating, Spontaneous Mind allows us to hear once again the impassioned voice of one of the most influential literary and cultural figures of our time.
Call Number: General Collection PS3513.I74 Z476 2001Publication Date: 2001
Snapshot Poetics: A Photographic Memoir of the Beat Era by
Allen Ginsberg and gregory corso posing naked in tangier timothy leary and neal cassady en route to millbrook psychedelic research center on ken kesseys merry prankster bus jack kerouac and william burroughs in ginsbergs new york apartment lawrence ferlinghetti and his dog witman in san franciscos city lights bookstore these are just a few of the bizarre snapshots of enduring beat era personalities appearing in this remarkable collection by one of the beat movements most celebrated founders poet allen ginsberg spanning more than three decades from 1953 to 1988 Snapshot Poetic contains candid photographs of legendary beat writers and artists as well as their disciples
Call Number: General Collection PS3513.I74 Z475 1993Publication Date: 1993
The Yage Letters Redux by
In January 1953, William Burroughs began a seven-month expedition into the jungles of South America, ostensibly to find yage, the fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. But Burroughs also cast his anthropological-satiric eye over the local regimes to record trademark vignettes of political and psychic malaise. From the notebooks he kept and the letters he wrote home to Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs composed a narrative of his adventures that appeared ten years later as "In Search of Yage" within The Yage Letters. That book, published by City Lights in 1963, was completed by the addition of Ginsberg's account of his own experiences with yage as he traveled through South America in 1960, and by the addition of other Burroughs letters and texts. For this new edition, Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has gone back to the original manuscripts to untangle the history of the text, telling the fascinating story of its genesis and cultural importance in his wide-ranging introduction. Also included in this edition are extensive materials, never before published, by both Burroughs and Ginsberg that shed new light on their adventures in exploration and writing "A complete understanding of the literary legacy of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg is impossible without reading this amazing collection of letters and documents centered on yage, the fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. . . . These crucial texts go beyond simple curiosity about mind-changing drugs to set the foundation of what would later become a literary movement that changed American literature."--Bloomsbury Review "Burroughs' book about his search for the 'ultimate fix', The Yage Letters, possesses an equally strange and secret history. Published in 1963 but written a decade earlier, it has long been seen as a fascinating curio in the Burroughs canon, yet a new edition of the book, edited by Oliver Harris, places it more centrally in the list of key Burroughs texts. . . . The Yage Letters marks the point when Burroughs moved full-time into his own, fully realised universe."--The Independent UK William Burroughs is widely recognized as one of the most influential and innovative writers of the twentieth century. His books include: Junky, Naked Lunch, Queer, The Wild Boys and The Place of Dead Roads. Oliver Harris is a professor in literature and film in the School of American Studies at Keele University. He is the editor of The Letters of William S, Burroughs (Penguin) and the 50th anniversary edition of Junky (Penguin).
Call Number: General Collection PS3552.U75 Y3 2006Publication Date: 2006
Burroughs Live by
Burroughs Live gathers all the interviews, both published and unpublished, given by William Burroughs, as well as conversations with well-known writers, artists, and musicians such as Tennessee Williams, Timothy Leary, Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso. Burroughs Live gathers all the interviews, both published and unpublished, given by William Burroughs, as well as conversations with well-known writers, artists, and musicians such as Tennessee Williams, Timothy Leary, Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso. The book provides a fascinating account of Burroughs's life as a literary outlaw. Illuminating many aspects of his work and many facets of his mind, it brings out his scathing humor, powerful intelligence, and nightmarish vision.
Call Number: General Collection PS3552.U75 Z463 2001Publication Date: 2001
Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs by
Marking the centenary of William S. Burroughs's birth, this exciting book reproduces the celebrated writer's many rarely seen photographs. Renowned and highly regarded for his experiments with literature, painting, film, and music, William S. Burroughs was also a prolific photographer. However, his photographic work, consisting of several thousand images, has so far received little critical attention or sustained public exposure. This book reproduces many previously unseen photographs and offers fascinating insights into his photographic practices. It also provides convincing evidence that his photos should be considered a significant aspect of his entire body of work. It includes portraits and self-portraits, location shots from his travels in Europe, the Americas, and North Africa, images of construction and demolition sites, and his individual and collaborative experiments with photomontage, assemblage, and collage. Essays by internationally acclaimed scholars of photography and of Burroughs's work offer a variety of critical perspectives on his photographic oeuvre, examining its sources, methodologies, biographical contexts, influences, and purposes. Certain to appeal to his many devoted fans, this publication also coincides with a recent revival of critical and cultural interest in the 1960s art scene and the Beat Generation's writers and artists.
Call Number: General Collection N6537.B876 A4 2014Publication Date: 2014
Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison, 1958-1960 by
A collection of letters by Neal Cassady to his wife, Carolyn, sent while the writer and Beat Generation muse was incarcerated for selling marijuana.
Call Number: General Collection CT275.C3458 A4 1993Publication Date: 1993
The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, 1956-1991 by
One of the central relationships in the Beat scene was the long-lasting friendship of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. Beginning in 1956 and continuing until 1991, the two men exchanged more than 850 letters. Bill Morgan, Ginsberg's biographer and an important editor of his papers, has selected the most significant correspondence from this long friendship. Robert Hass' insightful introduction discusses the lives of these two major poets and their enriching and moving relationship.
Call Number: General Collection PS3513.I74 Z487 2009Publication Date: 2009
Conversations with Amiri Baraka by
Collected interviews of the former LeRoi Jones, playwright, poet, fiction writer, & essayist.
Call Number: General Collection PS3552.A583 Z465 1994Publication Date: 1994
An Accidential Autobiography: The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso by
Fabulous letters from the vagabond Beat poet to his friendsamong them Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. For all his charm and intelligence poet Gregory Corso lived a vagabond life. He never held down a regular job. He rarely stayed very long under the same roof. He spent long stretchessome as long as four or five yearsabroad. Many of his letters came from EuropeFrance, England, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Greeceas he kept in touch with his circle of friendsamong them his best friend Allen Ginsberg and a steady supporter, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He left (or was left by) a number of girlfriends and he fathered five children along the way. He was apt to raise a bit of a ruckus at poetry readings and other public events. No one could be sure what he might do next except that he would write poetry and get it published and that it would be widely read. When the idea of a book of selected letters was first proposed, Gregory had some reservations about it. Would the book reveal too much of his private life? But then with typical hubris he said the equivalent of "let it all hang out" and "all" does hang out in An Accidental Autobiography. The book is indeed the next thing to an unplanned self-portrait and gives a lively sense of the life Gregory Corso led, marching to his own drummer and leaving in his wake such marvelous books of Beat poetry as The Happy Birthday of Death, Elegiac Feelings American, Long Live Man, and Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit. Bill Morgan, who is extremely conversant with the Beats, has done an admirable job collecting letters from libraries and various individuals across the country and then selecting and organizing them in a progression that spans Corso's lifetime. In addition to Morgan's introduction and commentary, the book includes a special foreword by poet and rock star Patti Smith as well as a number of photographs.
Call Number: General Collection PS3505.O763 Z48 2003Publication Date: 2003
How I Work As a Poet and Other Essays/Plays/Stories by
Welch's talk on his practice as a poet, plus his prose writings.
Call Number: General Collection PS3573.E45 H6Publication Date: 1973
Biographies and autobiographies
The Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady by
Criminal ... Saint ... Lunatic ... Genius ... Muse .... Once described by Jack Kerouac as "more like Dostoevsky than anyone I know," Neal Cassady lived what others could only write about. Serving as the model for Kerouac's frenetic hero, the hip, Noble Savage Dean Moriarty in On the Road, and "N.C., the secret hero" of Allen Ginsberg's provocative poem "Howl," Cassady was a genius of life lived on the edge of the abyss. Now, William Plummer strips away the mystery surrounding this enigmatic figure. Plummer brings Cassady to life: his coming of age in a Denver flophouse, his hustling across America, the car thefts that landed him in jail, his meeting with Kerouac and their mad-cap cross-country adventures, his experiments with sex and drugs, his second marriage to Carolyn Cassady, his teaming with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on an epochal acid trip, and finally his bizarre death. Black-and-white photographs add to this engrossing biography of an outrageous but fascinating life.
Call Number: General Collection CT275.C3458 P59 1990Publication Date: 1990
Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg by
This is Carolyn Cassady's story of her life at the centre of the beat generation. In 1948, at the age of 25, she married Neal Cassady. Less than ten years after their marriage, he had become a living legend, his wild spirit immortalized in the character of Dean Moriarty, the heroic traveller in Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Carolyn Cassady reveals how she had to compete for Neal's attention with his friends and lovers. Their marriage at first alienated poet Allen Ginsberg, who wanted Neal to himself. Even after the civil ceremony, Neal continued to see and test other women.
Call Number: General Collection PS3521.E735 Z594 1991Publication Date: 1991
When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School by
As a restless kid on Long Island, Sam Kashner lapped up the beauty and madness of the Beats, living vicariously through the novels, poems, and stories of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. Their words were revolutionary, and they turned their very lives into art. Kashner didn't want to just study the Beats, he wanted to be one of them. So when he heard that Ginsberg had founded an unconventional writing program in Boulder, Colorado, he convinced his parents that college could wait, and became the first certificate student of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In one motion, Kashner stepped out of a sheltered suburban life and plunged into the chaotic world of his idols. What he discovered was both everything and not at all what he expected. The Beats were facing their twilight years and feeling it in their joints and in their minds. Some of them, like Ginsberg and Burroughs, had achieved international fame, while others, like Gregory Corso, had not, and were coming to the realization that they might never receive the recognition they deserved. In his new role as student, secretary, and psychiatrist, Sam Kashner was caught up in the hilarity of the hijinks and the cross fire of old arguments, finding himself in hot tubs with Ginsberg and on field trips to the marijuana ranch cultivated by Burroughs and his ill-fated son, Billy. Out of this rich material Kashner brings us a funny, touching, and irreverent portrait of the Beats never before seen: one that explodes the myths surrounding these American icons, but one that is also deeply felt and full of admiration. After reading this book, you'll never look at the Beats in quite the same way again. When I Was Cool is also a very personal journey of a young man coming of age on the Beat slope of Mount Parnassus ("the Lower East Side" of the Rockies), a kind of Holden Caulfield for the postmodern era.
Call Number: General Collection PS3561.A697 Z468 2004Publication Date: 2004
The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac by
A groundbreaking portrait of Kerouac as a young artist--from the award-winning author of Minor Characters In The Voice is All, Joyce Johnson, author of her classic memoir, Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac, brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road, followed by Visions of Cody. By illuminating Kerouac's early choice to sacrifice everything to his work, The Voice Is All deals with him on his own terms and puts the tragic contradictions of his nature and his complex relationships into perspective.
Call Number: General Collection PS3521.E735 Z733 2012ISBN: 9780670025107Publication Date: 2012
Allen Ginsberg in America by
Rare, intimate glimpses of the master poet at the height of his charisma and infamy.
Call Number: General Collection PS3513.I74 Z7Publication Date: 1969
The People V. Ferlinghetti: The Fight to Publish Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" by
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's name does not appear in any First Amendment treatise or casebook. And yet when the best-selling poet and proprietor of City Lights Books was indicted under California law for publishing and selling Allen Ginsberg's poem, Howl, Ferglinghetti buttressed the tradition of dissident expression and ended an era when minds were still closed, candid literature still taboo, and when selling banned books was considered a crime. The People v. Ferlinghetti is the story of a rebellious poet, a revolutionary poem, an intrepid book publisher, and a bookseller unintimidated by federal or local officials. There is much color in that story: the bizarre twists of the trial, the swagger of the lead lawyer, the savvy of the young ACLU lawyer, and the surprise verdict of the Sunday school teacher who presided as judge. With a novelist's flair, noted free speech authorities, Ronald K. L. Collins and David Skover tell the true story of an American maverick who refused to play it safe and who in the process gave staying power to freedom of the press in America. The People v. Ferlinghetti will be of interest to anyone interested the history of free speech in America and the history of the Beat poets.
Call Number: General Collection KF224.F4 C65 2019ISBN: 9781538125892Publication Date: 2019
Gentleman Junkie: The Life and Legacy of William S. Burroughs by
A portrait of the iconoclastic literary pioneer describes his early life and education, his growing addiction to heroin, his role in the Beat movement, his landmark works, and his influence on the late twentieth century arts.
Call Number: General Collection PS3552.U75 Z58 1998Publication Date: 1998
The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation by
Anyone who cares to understand the cultural ferment of America in the later twentieth century must know of the writings and lives of those scruffy bohemians known as the Beats. In this highly entertaining work, Bill Morgan, the country's leading authority on the movement and a man who personally knew most of the Beat writers, narrates their history, tracing their origins in the 1940s to their influence on the social upheaval of the 1960s. The Beats, through their words and nonconformist lives, challenged staid postwar America. They believed in free expression, dabbled in free love, and condemned the increasing influence of military and corporate culture in our national life. But the Beats were not saints. They did too many drugs and consumed too much booze. The fervent belief in spontaneity that characterized their lives and writings destroyed some friendships. As we watch their peripatetic lives and sexual misadventures, we are reminded above all that while their personal lives may not have been holy, their typewriters and their lasting words very much were.
Call Number: General Collection PS228.B6 M58 2010Publication Date: 2010
Representative Men: The Biographical Essays by
Essays by Beat author John Clellon Holmes.
Call Number: General Collection PS3558.O3594 A6Publication Date: 1988
Recollections of My Life As a Woman: The New York Years: A Memoir by
""My earliest sense of what it means to be a woman was learned from my grandmother, Antoinette Mallozzi, and at her knee.... She smelled of lemons and olive oil, garlic and waxes and mysterious herbs. I loved to touch her skin."" "So begins Diane di Prima's memoir, in which she explores the first three decades of her life and how she came to define herself as a woman. She grew up in Brooklyn in the 1930s and '40s in an Italian American family, and only by heroic effort was she able to break away and follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Call Number: General Collection PS3507.I68 Z475 2001Publication Date: 2001
Tracking the Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents by
These are the true-life adventures of a woman who ranges over four continents, endeavoring to go beyond the limits of ordinary life. Recovering from an accident, she goes to Glastonbury, where she finds energy portrayed in ancient earthworks as a snake coiled in concentric circles around a hill. To walk this spiral is called threading the maze, which means both to ascend and to go deep within. This becomes a guiding emblem of her pilgrimages to sites of female spiritual and temporal power, from the Irish countryside to the Amazon jungle to the high mountain cultures of Nepal. "Fascinating people, places, and landscapes come alive at the touch of Vega's observant eye and open heart.Tracking the Serpent takes the reader on an exciting journey, as cultural exploration ignites dramatic self-discovery and spiritual insight." --Miranda Shaw "With poetry one line, in prose a steady mind. Vega learned from poetry how to use details, with prose, to keep track of time. I really respect this book." --Gregory Corso "In these remarkable accounts, full of color and suspense, Vega carries us along on the strength of her own urgency to places few of us will ever see for ourselves. An informative guide and a brave one, she never ceases to question her own assumptions. For the armchair traveler, these are splendid excursions." --Hettie Jones Janine Pommy Vega, Beat Generation writer, performer, and musician, is the author of twelve books. For many years she has worked with Poets in the Schools, and she is a member of PEN's Prison Writing Committee.
Call Number: General Collection G465 .R656 1997Publication Date: 1997Scratching the Beat Surface by This insider's view of the Beat scene of the fifties and early sixties vividly marks the advancement of a new perception of art as "a living bio-alchemical organism" through essays by a poet and playwright who helped shape the movement.
Call Number: General Collection PS3563.A262 S36 1982Publication Date: 1982
The Beat Hotel by
Called "a vivid picture of literary life along the Left Bank in the late 1950s and early 1960s . . . and fun reading" by Library Journal, The Beat Hotel is a delightful chronicle of a remarkable moment in American literary history. From the Howl obscenity trial to the invention of the cut-up technique, Barry Miles's extraordinary narrative chronicles the feast of ideas that was Paris, where the Beats took awestruck audiences with Duchamp and Celine, and where some of their most important work came to fruition -- Ginsberg's "Kaddish" and "To Aunt Rose"; Corso's The Happy Birthday of Death; and Burroughs's Naked Lunch. Based on firsthand accounts from diaries, letters, and many original interviews, The Beat Hotel is an intimate look at a place that, the San Francisco Chronicle has written, "gave the spirit of Dean Moriarty and the genius of Genet and Duchamp a place to dream together of new worlds over a glass of vin ordinaire".
Call Number: General Collection PS228.B6 M55 2000Publication Date: 2000
Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution by
An anthology of the lives, writings and secrets of the women of the Beat Generation, this book contains biographies poetry and prose by Hettie Jones, Joyce Johnson, Ruth Weiss, Jan Kerouac, and others. It contains commentary by American poet of the year Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg.
Call Number: General Collection PS508.W7 W585 1996Publication Date: 1996
This Is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris by
Beginning in New York in 1944, James Campbell finds the leading members of what was to become the Beat Generation in the shadows of madness and criminality. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs had each seen the insides of a mental hospital and a prison by the age of thirty. A few months after they met, another member of their circle committed a murder that involved Kerouac and Burroughs as material witnesses. This book charts the transformation of these experiences into literature, and a literary movement that spread across the globe. From "The First Cut-Up"--the murder in New York in 1944--we end up in Paris in 1960 with William Burroughs at the Beat Hotel, experimenting with the technique that made him notorious, what Campbell calls "The Final Cut-Up." In between, we move to San Francisco, where Ginsberg gave the first public reading of Howl. We discover Burroughs in Mexico City and Tangiers; the French background to the Beats; the Buddhist influence on Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and others; the "Muses" Herbert Huncke and Neal Cassady; the tortuous history of On the Road; and the black ancestry of the white hipster.
Call Number: General Collection PS226.B6 C36 2001Publication Date: 2001
Literary criticism
What's Your Road, Man?: Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac's On the Road by
The ten essays in this groundbreaking compilation cover a broad range of topics, employing a variety of approaches, including theoretical interpretations and textual and comparative analysis, to investigate such issues as race, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as the novel's historical and literary contexts. What's Your Road, Man? Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" illustrates the richness of the critical work currently being undertaken on this vital American narrative. Combining essays from renowned Kerouac experts and emerging scholars, What's Your Road, Man? draws on an enormous amount of research into the literary, social, cultural, biographical, and historical contexts of Kerouac's canonical novel. Since its publication in 1957, On the Road has remained in print and has continued to be one of the most widely read twentieth-century American novels. Several essays enhance understanding of the book by comparing it with alternative versions of the text, like the original 1951 scroll manuscript and some of Kerouac's other novels, and with works by Kerouac's contemporaries such as Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Further studies explore ethnicity, identity, and the novel's place in American literature as well as its relevance to twenty-first century readers. On the Road has inspired readers for more than fifty years, and the new research included in What's Your Road, Man? introduces fresh perspectives on this classic work of American literature. Editors Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton have successfully woven little-known material with new understandings of familiar topics that will enlighten current and future generations of Kerouac enthusiasts and scholars for years to come.
Call Number: General Collection PS3521.E735 O539 2009Publication Date: 2009
The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" 50 Years Later by
A tribute to Ginsberg's signature work, which stirred a generation of angel-headed hipsters to cultural rebellion. In 1956, City Lights, a small San Francisco bookstore, published Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems with its trademark black-and-white cover. The original edition cost seventy-five cents, but there was something priceless about its eponymous piece. Although it gave a voice to the new generation that came of age in the conservative years following World War II, the poem also conferred a strange, subversive power that continues to exert its influence to this day. Ginsberg went on to become one of the most eminent and celebrated writers of the second half of the twentieth century, and "Howl"became the critical axis of the worldwide literary, cultural, and political movement that would be known as the Beat generation. The year 2006 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of "Howl," andThe Poem That Changed America will celebrate and shed new light on this profound cultural work. With new essays by many of today's most distinguished writers, including Frank Bidart, Andrei Codrescu, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Daphne Merkin, Rick Moody, Robert Pinsky, and Luc Sante,The Poem That Changed America reveals the pioneering influence of "Howl" down through the decades and its powerful resonance today.
Call Number: General Collection PS3513.I74 H6356 2006Publication Date: 2006
Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization by
William S. Burroughs is one of America's most influential and widely studied writers. A leading member of the Beat movement, his books and essays continue to attract a wide readership. His films, paintings, recordings and other projects that grew out of his literary production, together with his iconic persona as a counter-culture (anti-)hero, mean his work has become a broad cultural phenomenon.This collection of essays by leading scholars offers an interdisciplinary consideration of Burroughs's art. It links his lived experience to his many major prose works written from 1953 on, as well his sound, cinema and media projects. Moving beyond the merely literary, the contributors argue for the continuing social and political relevance of Burroughs's work for the emerging global order.Themes include: Burroughs and contemporary theory; debates on 'reality'; violence; magic and mysticism ; cybernetic cultures; language and technology; control and transformation; transgression and addiction; the limits of prose; image politics and the avant-garde.
Call Number: General Collection PS3552.U75 Z835 2004Publication Date: 2004
Forest Beatniks and Urban Thoreaus by
The Beat Movement, which first rose to attention in 1955, has often been viewed by critics as an urban phenomenon --the product of a postwar-youth culture with roots in the cities of New York and San Francisco. This study examines another side of the Beat Movement: its strong desire for a reconnection with nature. Although each took a different path in attaining this goal, the writers considered here--Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, and Michael McClure--sought a new and closer connection to the natural world. These four writers, along with many of their counterparts in the Beat era, provided a crucial spark that helped to ignite the environmental movement of the 1970s and provided the foundation for the development of the current "Deep Ecology" worldview.
Call Number: ONLINEPublication Date: 2000
A Clown in a Grave: Complexities and Tensions in the Works of Gregory Corso by
Using a number of critical approaches, Michael Skau examines Gregory Corso's complex imagination, his humor, and his poetic techniques in dealing with America, the Beat generation, and death. Skau covers the complete works of Corso, one of the four major Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs) who attempted to provide an alternative to what they saw as the academic forms of literature dominating American writing through the 1940s and 1950s. The Beat option focused on ordinary people, spurning the cultural pretensions of the intelligentsia and using common language as well as the rhythms of actual speech. Corso, abandoned as a child by his mother, subjected to a variety of foster homes, and imprisoned as an adolescent, became an authentic voice of America's neglected streetwise youth. He embodies much of the tension, confusion, and rebellion that emerged in America after World War II and eventually crested in the 1960s. Corso emphasizes social issues, yet risks undermining this significance by using wit, wordplay, and humor. While conceding mortality, he is adamant in refusing to acknowledge death's power. Even as he rebels against conventional literature, he still is enchanted by classicism and romanticism, often borrowing their techniques and idioms. Skau examines these complexities and seeming contradictions throughout Corso's career, showing that Corso finds value in inconsistency and vacillation. For him, as illustrated in the poems "Hair" and "Marriage," contradiction and ambivalence suggest the foundations of freedom of imagination. In spite of Corso's significance as an American poet, Skau's is the first extensive study of his work, including his fiction. Skau also provides the first complete bibliography of Corso's published work in more than thirty years.
Call Number: General Collection PS3505.O763 Z87 1999Publication Date: 1999
Gregory Corso: A Doubting Thomist by
Gregory Corso is the most intensely spiritual of the Beat generation poets and still by far the least explored. The virtue of Kirby Olson's Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist is that it is the first book to place all of Corso's work in a philosophical perspective, concentrating on Corso as a poet torn between a static Catholic Thomist viewpoint and that of a progressive surrealist. While Corso is a subject of great controversy--his work often being seen as nihilistic and wildly comic--Olson argues that Corso's poetry, in fact, maintains an insistent theme of doubt and faith with regard to his early Catholicism. Although many critics have attempted to read his poetry, and some have done so brilliantly, Olson--in his approach and focus--is the first to attempt to give a holistic understanding of the oeuvre as essentially one not of entertainment or hilarity but of a deep spiritual and philosophical quest by an important and profound mind. In nine chapters, Olson addresses Corso from a broad philosophical perspective and shows how Corso takes on particular philosophical issues and contributes to new understandings. Corso's concerns, like his influence, extend beyond the Beat generation as he speaks about concerns that have troubled thinkers from the beginning of the Western tradition, and his answers offer provocative new openings for thought. Corso may very well be the most important Catholic poet in the American literary canon, a visionary like Burroughs and Ginsberg, whose work illuminated a generation. Written in a lively and engaging style, Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist seeks to keep Corso's memory alive and at last delve fully into Corso's poetry.
Call Number: General Collection PS3505.O763 Z73 2002Publication Date: 2002
The Beat Generation: A Gale Critical Companion by
This new line in "Gale's Literary Criticism Series presents comprehensive collections of criticism related to particular literary movements and themes throughout history. This new set focuses on the Beat Generation, covering the major topics, authors and works of the period complete with reprinted full-text i literary criticism. Volume 1 opens with an overview of the period followed by topical essays covering the Beat Generation and its relationship to publishing, visual and performing arts. Volumes 2 and 3 include entries on 28 major literary Figures associated with die movement. Author entries include introductions, a representative list of major works, primary source documents, reprinted criticism and lists of further reading sources. Additional features include a chronology of key events related to the Beat Generation; black-and-white author portraits; and author, title and subject indexes.
Call Number: General Collection PS228.B6 B42 2003Publication Date: 2003
The Beats: A Literary History by
Kerouac. Ginsberg. Burroughs. These are the most famous names of the Beat Generation, but in fact they were only the front line of a much more wide-ranging literary and cultural movement. This critical history takes readers through key works by these authors, but also radiates out to discuss dozens more writers and their works, showing how they all contributed to one of the most far-reaching literary movements of the post-World War II era. Moving from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, this book explores key aesthetic and thematic innovations of the Beat writers, the pervasiveness of the Beatnik caricature, the role of the counterculture in the post-war era, the involvement of women in the Beat project, and the changing face of Beat political engagement during the Vietnam War era.
Call Number: General Collection PS228.B6 B485 2020Publication Date: 2020
The Beat Generation and the Popular Novel in the United States, 1945-1970 by
The "Beat Generation" that emerged after World War II and reached its zenith in the 1960s represented an era of new perspectives. The questioning, anti-establishment view of the world prevalent among the various members of the Beat Movement found its voice in both novels and poetry. The novels especially, or what might be called underground narratives, were a driving force within the literary, social and cultural revolution that characterized the Beats. This study of the American novel during that era presents the forerunners of the literary tradition of the Beats and examines the major genres of the Beat novel: the juvenile delinquent novel, the self-discovering novel of individuality, the gay novel, the drug novel, the new journalism, and novels taking on topics of defiance and submission. From novels that have found a mainstream acceptance, like The Blackboard Jungle, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and On the Road, to lesser-known works like Go, Young Adam, and Flee the Angry Strangers, numerous representative works are examined in depth. Also included is a chronology of underground narratives, showing the development of these novels from their early twentieth century antecedents to current works.
Call Number: General Collection PS374.P63 N49 2000Publication Date: 2000
Writing Beat and Other Occasions of Literary Mayhem by
The story and history of the Beats couldn't be found in the traditional libraries or archives of academic research. For preeminent historian of Beat culture John Tytell, it had to be found in the bars, towns, roads, and hangouts of these writers and figures. And as Writing Beat demonstrates, the same techniques apply to new and future writers. Approaching the history of postwar twentieth-century American literature, and in particular the Beat literary movement of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others, Tytell finds himself uniquely positioned as an eyewitness to many of these stories. In this book, he shares his insight with the reader. As he interviewed, drank, traveled, and survived countless moments with some of these literary legends, Tytell discovered much about the craft of nonfiction and biography, and the nature of history. Writing Beat demonstrates, through Tytell's growth as a professor and historian of the Beats, lessons learned and hazards encountered for those aspiring to become writers themselves. As we approach the sixtieth anniversary of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Writing Beat reminds us writers do not spring to life fully formed, and the struggle to get to literature can be a blast.
Call Number: General Collection PS228.B6 T97 2014Publication Date: 2014
