This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century countercultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range. The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure and the work of such women writers as Diane DiPrima and Denise Levertov. LeRoi Jones’s plaintive “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” and Bob Kaufman’s stirring “Abomunist Manifesto” appear here alongside statements on poetics and the alternately incendiary and earnest correspondence of Beat Generation writers. Visceral and powerful, infused with an unmediated spiritual and social awareness, this is a rich and varied tribute and, in the populist spirit of the Beats, a vital addition to the libraries of readers everywhere.

An anthology of the best of the beats edited by Anne Waldman (who should know) and containing a chronology of the movement from Kerouac to Snyder. The emphasis is on the the poetry and prose excerpts; However, the volume includes brief biographical sketches, an introduction by Ginsberg, a recommended beat vacation guide of the places where the gang passed out or recovered, and more scholarly references. The writers selected for inclusion represent the core of beat: Corso, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Orlovsky, di Prima, Burroughs, Baraka, Ferlinghetti, Kyger, Kandel, Kaufman, Whalen, McClure, and Snyder. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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In New York in 1944, 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 30. This book charts the transformation of these experiences into literature, and a literary movement that spread across the globe. 35 photos.

First published in 1956, Allen Ginsberg's Howl is a prophetic masterpiece—an epic raging against dehumanizing society that overcame censorship trials and obscenity charges to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. This annotated version of Ginsberg's classic is the poet's own re-creation of the revolutionary work's composition process—as well as a treasure trove of anecdotes, an intimate look at the poet's writing techniques, and a veritable social history of the 1950s.

The Beat Generation was a group of writers who rejected cultural standards, experimented with drugs, and celebrated sexual liberation. Starting in the 1950s with works such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, the Beat Generation defined an experimental zeitgeist that endures to today. Yet left out of this picture are the Beat women, who produced a large body of writing from the 1950s through the 1970s and beyond. In Women Writers of the Beat Era, Mary Paniccia Carden gives voice to these female writers and demonstrates how their work redefines our understanding of "Beat." The first single-authored study on female writers of this generation, the book offers vital analysis of autobiographical works by Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, and others, introducing the reader to new voices that interact with and reconfigure the better-known narratives of the male Beat writers. In doing so, Carden demonstrates the significant role women played in this influential and dynamic literary movement.

San Francisco Beat is an essential archive of the Beat Generation, a rich moment in a fortunate place. America, somnolent, conformist and paranoid in the 1950s, was changed forever by a handful of people who refused an existence of drudgery and enterprise, opting instead for a life of personal, spiritual and artistic adventure. In these intimate, free-wheeling conversations, a baker's dozen of the poets of San Francisco talk about the scene then and now, the traditions of poetry, and about anarchism, globalism, Zen, the Bomb, the Kabbalah and the Internet. Diane di Prima, William Everson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, Joanne Kyger, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Jack Micheline, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen " . . . as we begin to slip into a national slumber somewhat akin to that of the Eisenhower years, it’s exhilarating to have this squall line of Beats pass through our consciousness."—Kirkus Reviews " . . . fierce engagement executed with humor and vernacular sensitivity."—Dale Smith, Austin Chronicle David Meltzer (1937-2016) was the author of many books of poetry, including Tens, The Name, Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957-1992 and Two-Way Mirror (City Lights). He was the editor of Birth, The Secret Garden, Reading Jazz and Writing Jazz, among other collections. His agit-smut fictions include The Agency Trilogy. Meltzer read poetry at the Jazz Cellar in the 1950s and in the 1960s fronted the band, "Serpent Power."