Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of Revolution
Female Beats wrote poetry, took drugs, went on the road, listened to   jazz, and lived on the fringe just as the men did, but their accomplishments  are not as widely recognized. This volume attempts to correct this  oversight by profiling 40 women of the Beat generation and publishing  samples of their work. Well-known poets Diane di Prima and Denise Levertov  appear in the volume, along with the muses of male writers and other women  who never became famous at all. As Brenda Knight notes in her introduction,  counterculture women in the 1950s and 1960s faced difficult obstacles: "To  be unmarried, a poet, an artist, to bear biracial children, to go on the  road was doubly shocking for a woman, and social condemnation was high."   The first portion of the anthology is devoted to women who were not Beats  but who set the stage for the movement. Josephine Miles wrote poetry and  mentored the younger Beat poets at Berkeley, while Madeline Gleason founded  the San Francisco Poetry Festival. In the "Muses" section are short  biographies of wives and girlfriends of famous male writers such as Jack  Kerouac and Neal Cassady. It's widely known that William S. Burroughs shot  his wife Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs; this book fills in other details of  her wild and short life. Profiles of writers such as Joyce Johnson, Hettie  Jones, Janna McClure, and Janine Pommy Vega account for the rest of the  anthology. The lives these women led are as interesting as their writing,  andWomen of the Beat Generationhonors their determination to live  outside the mainstream.--Jill Marquis