Follows the counterculture escapades of members of the Beat generation as they seek pleasure and meaning while traveling coast to coast. As he travels across 1950s America, aspiring writer Sal Paradise chronicles his escapades with the charismatic Dean Moriarty. Sal admires Dean's passion for experiencing as much as possible of life and his wild flights of poetic fancy

Coming down from his carefree youth and unwanted fame, Jack Kerouac undertakes a mature confrontation of some of his most troubling emotional issues: a burgeoning problem with alcoholism, addiction, fear, and insecurity. He dutifully records his ever-changing states of consciousness, which culminate in a powerful religious experience. Big Sur was written some time after Jack Kerouac's best-known works, following a visit to northern California and...

This in-depth biography--the first to explore the ups and downs of Neal Cassady--takes a look at the man who achieved immortality as Dean Moriarty, the central character in Jack Kerouac's On the Road. A charismatic, funny, articulate, and formidably intelligent man, Cassady was also a compulsive womanizer who lived life on the edge. His naturalistic, conversational writing style inspired Kerouac, who lifted a number of passages verbatim and unaccredited...

Tom Harry has a streak of frost in his black pompadour and a bar called the Medicine Lodge, the chief watering hole of the town of Gros Ventre, in northern Montana. tom also has a son named Rusty, whose mother deserted them years ago. they're an odd kind of family, but they manage just fine. Until the summer of 1960, when Rusty turns twelve. Change arrives with gale force in the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom knew back when, and her beatnik...

From the publisher. This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century countercultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range. The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation...

A profile of the iconic author's early years offers insight into his efforts to bridge his dual cultural heritage while exploring how his French Canadian background enriched his prose.

Includes material on Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Rexroth, among others.

"Born in the wake of World War II, and reaching expressive peaks during the otherwise staid 1950s, the Beat Generation was the first in American history to defiantly break from the past and point the way forward for young Americans. Every subculture to emerge since owes a debt to the Beats, who left an indelible mark on American history." "Drawing on extensive research to show just how profound an impact the Beats had on American culture, politics,...