First published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac's most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans--mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer-- whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco's Bohemia to solitude...

Synopsis: One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces,...

Set in the New England town, a family including three daughters and five sons, each endowed with an energy and vision of life, drives the narrative from the early part of the century to the years following World War II.

After a lifetime, this (r)evolutionary little book is still a work-in-progress, the poet's "ars poetica," to which at 88 he is constantly adding. From the groundbreaking (and bestselling) "A Coney Island of the Mind" in 1958 to the "personal epic" of "Americus, Book I" in 2003, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has, in more than thirty books, been the poetic conscience of America. Now in "Poetry As Insurgent Art," he offers, in prose, his primer of what poetry...

"Philip Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and key figure in the literary and artistic scene that unfolded in San Francisco in the 1950s and '60s. When the Beat writers came West, Whalen became a revered, much-loved member of the group. Erudite, shy, and profoundly spiritual, his presence not only moved his immediate circle of Beat cohorts, but his powerful, startling, innovative work would come to impact American poetry to the present day....

A posthumous collection of more than 100 Ginsberg poems is largely comprised of spontaneously penned or forgotten works included in letters or sent to obscure publications and is arranged in chronological order and complemented by extensive author notes. --Publisher's description.

Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll explores the interaction between two of the most powerful socio-cultural movements in the post-war years - the literary forces of the Beat Generation and the musical energies of rock and its attendant culture.Simon Warner examines the interweaving strands, seeded by the poet/novelists Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others in the 1940s and 1950s, and cultivated by most of the major rock figures who...

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's name does not appear in any First Amendment treatise or casebook. And yet when the best-selling poet and proprietor of City Lights Books was indicted under California law for publishing and selling Allen Ginsberg's poem, Howl, Ferglinghetti buttressed the tradition of dissident expression and ended an era when minds were still closed, candid literature still taboo, and when selling banned books was considered a crime. The...