The Beats A Literary History

Kerouac. Ginsberg. Burroughs. These are the most famous names of the Beat Generation, but in fact they were only the front line of a much more wide-ranging literary and cultural movement. This critical history takes readers through key works by these authors, but also radiates out to discuss dozens more writers and their works, showing how they all contributed to one of the most far-reaching literary movements of the post-World War II era. Moving from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, this book explores key aesthetic and thematic innovations of the Beat writers, the pervasiveness of the Beatnik caricature, the role of the counterculture in the post-war era, the involvement of women in the Beat project, and the changing face of Beat political engagement during the Vietnam War era.

Part I. Get Hip, My Soul: How It All Started (1944–1948): 1. The wild outré gang of Columbia campus: the beginnings of a movement; 2. Write for them about them personally: the Beats and avant-garde literary networks at midcentury; Part II. Underground to Literary Celebrity (1948–1957): 3. Hipsters in the zoo: how the Beats came up from the underground; 4. The rise of the Beat novel: factualism to spontaneity; 5. The rise of Beat poetry: raw experience meets raw language; Part III. The Beatnik Era and the Profusion of Beat Literature (1958–1962): 6. The establishment strikes back: Beat becomes Beatnik; 7. Little magazines and subterranean networks; 8. The opening of the field; 9. Revisions of the real; 10. Ignus: from the Beat Hotel to Pull My Daisy; Part IV. Beat Politics (1962–1969): 11. The women who said something; 12. Liberating language; 13. The Vietnam effect; Coda.

Steven Belletto is Professor of English at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. He is author of No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012), editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017) and American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960 (2017). He is also co-editor of Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War (with Joseph Keith, 2019) and American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment (with Daniel Grausam, 2012). He is currently editor for the journal Contemporary Literature.