The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960 (Circles of the Twentieth Century)

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.