The
Birth of the Beat Generation : Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters,
1944-1960 (Circles of the Twentieth Century) by Steven
Watson
Concisely told and full of fascinating detail,
"The Birth of the Beat Generation" chronicles the
complex relationships among maverick writers William Burroughs,
Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac and the figures who surrounded
them. With a new Afterword by Robert Creeley, this second volume
in the widely praised series is devoted to the founders and
founding ideas of Modernism.
"In the second volume in the series
"Circles of the Twentieth Century," devoted to
avant-garde writers, Watson (The Harlem Renaissance, Pantheon,
1995) traces the lives of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and
company from their initial meetings in New York to their rise to
literary fame. Watson also examines confluent movements like the
San Francisco renaissance and the Black Mountain School. Watson
offers no startling revelations, but he writes gracefully and has
a gift for synthesis. An innovative book design makes interesting
use of the margins for quotations, photos, and brief notes. This
lively companion to John Tytell's Naked Angels belongs in most
literature collections." -- William Gargan, Brooklyn
Coll. Lib., CUNY
"Watson takes you to the bars, the crash
pads, the seedy hotels where things actually happened...[and]
brilliantly evokes the conditions under which art and literature
were made." -- Luc Sante
Howl
and Other Poems by Allen
Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams (Introduction)
The epigraph for Howl
is from Walt
Whitman: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the
doors themselves from their jambs!" Announcing his intentions
with this ringing motto, Allen Ginsberg published a volume of
poetry which broke so many social taboos that copies were
impounded as obscene, and the publisher, poet Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, was arrested. The court case that followed found
for Ginsberg and his publisher, and the publicity made both the
poet and the book famous. Ginsberg went on from this beginning to
become a cultural icon of sixties radicalism. This works seminal
place in the culture is indicated in Czeslaw
Milosz's poetic tribute to Ginsberg: "Your blasphemous
howl still resounds in a neon desert where the human tribe
wanders, sentenced to unreality".
