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Beat Literature & History
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The Beat Generation may be most famous for Jack Kerouac (On the Road), Allen Ginsberg (Howl), and William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), but in fact it claims an amazing number of inspired writers. Delve into our complete selection of fine books by and about the Beats and their accomplices —among them, Neal Cassady, Herbert Huncke, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Ted Joans, John Clellon Holmes, Anne Waldman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, Bob Creeley, Kenneth Rexroth. Browse your favorite author, search for a specific title, or just look through the entire selection of over 200 Beat books, presented alphabetically by author.
Books in this online selection represent only a sliver of what we offer in the store. If you've got a particular book in mind and want to check on its availability, call us at 415-362-8193.
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Windblown World
The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954
Jack Kerouac, Douglas Brinkley
Jack Kerouac is best known through the image he put forth in his autobiographical novels. Yet it is only his private journals, in which he set down the raw material of his life and thinking, that reveal to us the real Kerouac. In Windblown World...
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Book of Sketches
Jack Kerouac
A never-before-published book of poems by Jack Kerouac—in a deluxe package In 1952 and 1953 as he wandered around America, Jack Kerouac jotted down spontaneous prose poems, or “sketches” as he called them, on small notebooks that he...
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Left Out in the Rain
Poems
Gary Snyder
Inspired by the ancient Chinese proverb, "There's nothing you can own that can't be left out in the rain," this collection charts the journeys of the poet from 1947 to 1985. This book is unique among Gary Snyder's numerable works, and the poems...
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The Yage Letters Redux
Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Oliver Harris
In January 1953, William Burroughs began a seven-month expedition into the jungles of South America, ostensibly to find yage, the fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. But Burroughs also cast his anthropological-satiric eye over the local regimes...
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Americus, Book I
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti lights out for the territories with Book I of his own born-in-the-U.S.A. epic, Americus. Describing Americus as "part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epic—a descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true...
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Missing Men
A Memoir
Joyce Johnson
Joyce Johnson’s classic memoir of growing up female in the 1950s, Minor Characters, was one of the initiators of an important new genre: the personal story of a minor player on history’s stage.
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Conversations With Jack Kerouac
There are few writers about whom it can be said that they write just like they speak, but Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) is clearly one of them. In 1957, Kerouac was a struggling writer trying to create a new literary aesthetic based on the rhythms of human...
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Axe Handles
Poems
Gary Snyder
The title poem of this collection may be Snyder's strongest poem of the 1980s, and this is high praise. Incorporating Snyder's familiar and welcome themes of nature, family and eastern philosophy, it is a passage into a world of insights, small...
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Pictures of the Gone World CD & Bonus DVD
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti may not be as recognized by mainstream culture as some of his beat poet counterparts, but to scholars and devotees of beat culture he is one of the most important and revered figures of the movement. This two-disc set features Ferlin
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Collected Letters, 1944-1967
Neal Cassady
Neal Cassady is best remembered today as Jack Kerouac's muse and the basis for the character "Dean Moriarty" in Kerouac's classic On The Road, and as one of Ken Kesey's merriest of Merry Pranksters, the driver of the psychedelic bus "Further,"...
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Queer Beats
How the Beats Turned America on to Sex
Regina Marler
The writings that shocked America out of the 1950s. Blasting through the crew-cuts and conformism of their day, the Beat writers were queer in the fullest sense of the word: their fluid sexuality challenged all sexual and romantic conventions. Most...
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Beat Thing
David Meltzer
During the late 1950s, David Meltzer was an active poet in the San Francisco North Beach scene often reading with jazz musicians at various bars and coffeehouses. Beat Thing is part poetry and part exposé, both tribute to the down in the street...
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Americus, Book I
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
In less than a year, Lawrence Ferlinghetti won a lifetime achievement award from the Author's Guild, received the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and celebrated the 50th...
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The Portable Beat Reader
Ann Charters
The Portable Beat Reader is an excellent and thorough study of the Beat Generation, compiled and edited by Ann Charters, biographer of Jack Kerouac and one of our most notable experts on Beat literature and ideas. This lively work of scholarship goes...
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