The birth of the beat generation
Subtitle: visionaries, rebels, and hipsters, 1944-1960
By: Steven Watson.
Edition: lst ed.
Series: Circles of the twentieth century
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 1995
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 387
Subjects: American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Beat generation; Dissenters in literature; United States -- Civilization -- 20th century
Description: Concisely told and full of fascinating detail, The Birth of the Beat Generation chronicles the life and times of the maverick poets and novelists William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, as well as the San Francisco group, which included Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder. It also evokes the figures surrounding them, including Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, and Peter Orlovsky.

This is the first book to link the Beats to one another, explaining how they became a group and tracing the connections between Beat lives and such Beat literature as Kerouac's On the Road, Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems, and Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Accompanying the text are maps, more than one hundred photographs, two sociograms, quotations from Beat works and conversation, chronologies, and a vast lexicon of the slang that defines the nuances and complexities of the Beat world and mind.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.