Memoirs of a Beatnik is an account of a young artist coming of age sensually and intellectually. The book grew out of the author's own experience as a bold and independent woman who dropped out of college at the age of 18 in order to write.

Long regarded as an underground classic for its gritty and unabashedly erotic portrayal of the Beat years, Memoirs of a Beatnik is a moving account of a powerful woman artist coming of age sensually and intellectually in a movement dominated by a small confederacy of men, many of whom she lived with and loved. Filled with anecdotes about her adventures in New York City, Diane di Prima's memoir shows her learning to "raise her rebellion into art," and making her way toward literary success. Memoirs of a Beatnik offers a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumphs of the imagination.

In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school. Immersing herself in Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, di Prima quickly emerged as a renowned poet, an influential editor, and a single mother at a time when this was unheard of. Vividly chronicling the intense, creative cauldron of those years, she recounts her revolutionary relationships and sexuality, and how her experimentation led her to define herself as a woman. What emerges is a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumph of the imagination, and how one woman discovered her role in the world.

This is a revealing look at the events and personalities that defined the Beat Generation, drawing on over three decades of research. Beatniks: A Guide to an American Subculture gets readers past the caricature of the "beatnik" as a goateed, beret-wearing, bongo-playing poseur, drawing on extensive research to show just how profound an impact the beats had on American culture, politics, and literature. Beatniks conveys the complexity, influences, events, and places that shaped the Beat Generation from the late 1940s to the cusp of the 1960s. The book also features a series of essays on specific aspects of the subculture, as well as interviews with Beat Generation luminaries like Allen Ginsberg, Ann Charters, Roy Harper and Michael McClure. Throughout, readers will meet an extraordinary gallery of people both famous—Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady—and lesser known but no less fascinating, including Kenneth Patchen, Lord Buckley, Mort Sahl, Jack Micheline, Lew Welch, Joan Vollmer Adams, and Lenore Kandel. Also included is a detailed glossary with the origins and meanings of the beat lingo.

Loba is a visionary epic quest for the reintegration of the femimine, hailed by many as the great female counterpart to Allen Ginsberg's Howl when the first half appeared in 1978. Now published for the first time in its completed form with new material, Loba, "she-wolf" in Spanish explores the wilderness at the heart of experience, through the archetype of the wolf goddess, elemental symbol of complete self-acceptance.

An amazing autobiography of a criminal from a forgotten time in american history. Jack Black was a burgler, safe-cracker, highwayman and petty thief.

He was the leading light of the Beat Generation writers and the most dynamic author of his time, but Jack Kerouac also had a lifelong passion for music, particularly the mid-century jazz of New York City, the development of which he witnessed first-hand during the 1940s with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk to the fore. The novelist, most famous for his 1957 book On the Road, admired the sounds of bebop and attempted to bring something of their original energy to his own writing, a torrent of semi-autobiographical stories he published between 1950 and his early death in 1969. Yet he was also drawn to American popular music of all kinds – from the blues to Broadway ballads – and when he came to record albums under his own name, he married his unique spoken word style with some of the most talented musicians on the scene. Kerouac's musical legacy goes well beyond the studio recordings he made himself: his influence infused generations of music makers who followed in his work – from singer-songwriters to rock bands. Some of the greatest transatlantic names – Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison and David Bowie, Janis Joplin and Tom Waits, Sonic Youth and Death Cab for Cutie, and many more – credited Kerouac's impact on their output. In Kerouac on Record, we consider how the writer brought his passion for jazz to his prose and poetry, his own record releases, the ways his legacy has been sustained by numerous more recent talents, those rock tributes that have kept his memory alive and some of the scores that have featured in Hollywood adaptations of the adventures he brought to the printed page.