Ann Charters

An anthology of writing from the Beat Generation features the surrealism of Burroughs, the poetry of Ginsberg, the zen prose of Gary Snyder, and essays, songs lyrics, letters, and memoirs by Cassady, Corso, Di Prima, Dylan, Baraka, and Kerouac. Reprint.

The Portable Beat Reader

What Was the Beat Generation?

Beat Down to Your Soul

Now that Kerouac's major novel, On the Road is accepted as an American classic, academic critics are slowly beginning to catch up with his experimental literary methods and examine the dozen books comprising what he called 'the legend of Duluoz.' Nearly all of his books have been in print internationally since his death in 1969, and his writing has been discovered and enjoyed by new readers throughout the world. Kerouac's view of the promise of America, the seductive and lovely vision of the beckoning open spaces of our continent, has never been expressed better by subsequent writers, perhaps because Kerouac was our last writer to believe in America's promise--and essential innocence--as the legacy he would explore in his autobiographical fiction.

A Biography

Kerouac

In its sixth edition, the most widely adopted anthology of its kind continues to offer an exceptional array of stories, writer commentaries, and editorial features to help students read, think, and write about short fiction.

An Introduction to Short Fiction

The Story and Its Writer

This brief edition of the most widely adopted book of its kind offers all of the editorial features of the longer book with about half the stories and writer commentaries in a shorter, less expensive format.

Jack Kerouac

The story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik

I love

This new volume in the series, Dictionary of Literary Biography, contains biographic and bibliographic information about American writers from 1948 to 1950-60. They are known as "beats" or "beatniks" and include Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti. ISBN 0-8103-1148-8 (set).

The Beats, Literary Bohemians in Postwar America

Samuel Charters

From 1948 to 1951, when Kerouac's wanderings took him back to New York, he and Holmes met almost daily. Struggling to find a form for the novel he intended to write, Kerouac climbed the stairs to the apartment in midtown Manhattan where Holmes lived with his wife to read the pages of Holmes' manuscript for the novel Go as they left the typewriter. With the pages of Holmes' final chapter still in his mind, he was at last able to crack his own writing dilemma. In a burst of creation in April 1951 he drew all the materials he had been gathering into the scroll manuscript of On the Road. --

John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation

Brother-souls

An anthology of works by Beat figures, as well as essays and commentaries, explores the light side of the Beat generation, its impact on post-World War II American culture, and the contribution of women authors.

What was the Beat Generation?

One of the most progressive literary movements, the Beat Generation was a phenomenon of 1950s America that sent shock waves aroung the world. This book captures the flavour of defiance of Beat generation in a comprehensive anthology of the movement's most important prose and poetry. Novel excerpts, stories, essays and songs are joined by biographical sketches of the major Beat writers and a selection of memoirs and tributes.

The Penguin Book of the Beats

John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of Kerouac’s life they were—in Holmes’s words—“Brother Souls.” Both were neophyte novelists, hungry for literary fame but just as hungry to find a new way of responding to their experiences in a postwar American society that for them had lost its direction. Late one night as they sat talking, Kerouac spontaneously created the term “Beat Generation” to describe this new attitude they felt stirring around them. Brother Souls is the remarkable chronicle of this cornerstone friendship and the life of John Clellon Holmes. From 1948 to 1951, when Kerouac’s wanderings took him back to New York, he and Holmes met almost daily. Struggling to find a form for the novel he intended to write, Kerouac climbed the stairs to the apartment in midtown Manhattan where Holmes lived with his wife to read the pages of Holmes’s manuscript for the novel Go as they left the typewriter. With the pages of Holmes’s final chapter still in his mind, he was at last able to crack his own writing dilemma. In a burst of creation in April 1951 he drew all the materials he had been gathering into the scroll manuscript of On the Road. Biographer Ann Charters was close to John Clellon Holmes for more than a decade. At his death in 1988 she was one of a handful of scholars allowed access to the voluminous archive of letters, journals, and manuscripts Holmes had been keeping for twenty-five years. In that mass of material waited an untold story. These two ambitious writers, Holmes and Kerouac, shared days and nights arguing over what writing should be, wandering from one explosive party to the next, and hanging on the new sounds of bebop. Through the pages of Holmes’s journals, often written the morning after the events they recount, Charters discovered and mined an unparalleled trove describing the seminal figures of the Beat Generation: Holmes, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and their friends and lovers.

Brother-Souls

The Beats

The Portable Jack Kerouac

The second and final volume of letters from the Kerouac collection documents his romances, travels, writing, and emotional struggles, as well as his relationships with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Malcolm Cowley, and others. Reprint.

Ann Charters

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