Best Beat Generation Criticism Books
Here you will get Best Beat Generation Criticism Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. On the Road
Author: by Jack Kerouac
0140283293
English
293 pages
The legendary novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation, now in a striking new Pengiun Classics Deluxe Edition Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience.
Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naivet and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.
2. On the Road: The Original Scroll (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Author: by Jack Kerouac
English
416 pages
0143105469
The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published as Kerouac originally composed it IN THREE WEEKS in April of 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his first full draft of On the Roadtyped as a single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper, which he later taped together to form a 120-foot scroll.
A major literary event when it was published in Viking hardcover in 2007, this is the uncut version of an American classicrougher, wilder, and more provocative than the official work that appeared, heavily edited, in 1957. This version, capturing a moment in creative history, represents the first full expression of Kerouac’s revolutionary aesthetic.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
3. The Dharma Bums
Author: by Jack Kerouac
Penguin Books
English
244 pages
Jack Kerouac’s classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of natureFirst published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac’s most powerful and influential novels.
The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans-mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer-whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco’s Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras.
4. Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960: On the Road / The Dharma Bums / The Subterraneans / Tristessa / Lonesome Traveler / Journal Selections (Library of America)
Author: by Jack Kerouac
Library of America
English
864 pages
The raucous, exuberant, often wildly funny account of a journey through America and Mexico, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road instantly defined a generation on its publication in 1957: it was, in the words of a New York Times reviewer, the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as beat.’ Written in the mode of ecstatic improvisation that Allen Ginsberg described as spontaneous bop prosody, Kerouac’s novel remains electrifying in its thirst for experience and its defiant rebuke of American conformity.
In his portrayal of the fervent relationship between the writer Sal Paradise and his outrageous, exasperating, and inimitable friend Dean Moriarty, Kerouac created one of the great friendships in American literature; and his rendering of the cities and highways and wildernesses that his characters restlessly explore is a hallucinatory travelogue of a nation he both mourns and celebrates.
Now, The Library of America collects On the Road together with four other autobiographical road books published during a remarkable four-year period. The Dharma Bums (1958), at once an exploration of Buddhist spirituality and an account of the Bay Area poetry scene, is notable for its thinly veiled portraits of Kerouac’s acquaintances, including Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Rexroth.
5. Desolation Angels
Author: by Jack Kerouac
Penguin Books
English
409 pages
The classic autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac featuring “one of the most true, comic, and grizzly journeys in American literature” (Time)now in a new edition Originally published in 1965, this autobiographical novel covers a key year in Jack Kerouac’s lifethe period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957.
After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac’s fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London.
Duluoz attempts to extricate himself from the world but fails, for one must “live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.” Desolation Angels is quintessential Kerouac.
6. The Portable Beat Reader (Penguin Classics)
Author: by Ann Charters
0142437530
English
688 pages
Beginning in the late 1940’s, American literature discovered a four-letter word, and the word was “beat.” Beat as in poverty and beatitude, ecstasy and exile. Beat was Jack Kerouac touring the American road in prose as fast and reckless as a V-8 Chevy.
It was the junk-sick surrealism of William Burroughs; the wild, Whitmanesque poetry of Allen Ginsberg; and the lumberjack Zen of Gary Snyder. The Portable Beat Reader collects the most significant writing of these and fellow members (and spiritual descendants) of the Beat Generation, including Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Bob Dylan, Leroi Jones, and Michael McClure.
In poetry, fiction, essays, song lyrics, letters, and memoirs, it captures the triumphant rudeness, energy, and exhilaration of a movement that swept through American letters with hurricane force. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world.
With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
7. And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
Author: by William S. Burroughs
Grove Press
English
224 pages
The legendary novel whose true events inspired the film KILL YOUR DARLINGSIn the summer of 1944, a shocking murder rocked the fledgling Beats.William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, both still unknown, we inspired by the crime to collaborate on a novel, a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and art, obsession and brutality, with scenes and characters drawn from their own lives.
Finally published after more than sixty years, this is a captivating read, and incomparable literary artifact, and a window into the lives and art of two of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.
8. The Town and the City
Author: by Jack Kerouac
Mariner Books
English
512 pages
In this compelling first novel, Kerouac draws on his New England mill-town boyhood to create the world of George and Marguerite Martin and their eight children, each endowed with an energy and a vision of life.
9. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, And America
Author: by Dennis Mcnally
Da Capo Press
English
416 pages
“A blockbuster of a biography … Absolutely magnificent.”-San Francisco ChronicleJack Kerouac-“King of the Beats,” unwitting catalyst for the ’60s counterculture, groundbreaking author-was a complex and compelling man: a star athlete with a literary bent; a spontaneous writer vilified by the New Critics but adored by a large, youthful readership; a devout Catholic but aspiring Buddhist; a lover of freedom plagued by crippling alcoholism.
Desolate Angel follows Kerouac from his childhood in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, to his early years at Columbia where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, beginning a four-way friendship that would become a sociointellectual legend.
In rich detail and with sensitivity, Dennis McNally recounts Kerouac’s frenetic cross-country journeys, his experiments with drugs and sexuality, his travels to Mexico and Tangier, the sudden fame that followed the publication of On the Road, the years of literary triumph, and the final near-decade of frustration and depression.
10. Mexico City Blues: 242 Choruses
Author: by Jack Kerouac
Grove Press
English
256 pages
Kerouac’s most important poem, Mexico City Blues, incorporates all the elements of his theory of spontaneous composition. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are all lyrically combined in the loose format of the blues to create an original and moving epic.
“I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses; my ideas vary and sometimes roll from chorus to chorus or from halfway through a chorus to halfway into the next.” “A spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature.” – Allen Ginsberg; “Kerouac calls himself a jazz poet.
There is no doubt about his great sensitivity to language. His sentences frequently move into tempestuous sweeps and whorls and sometimes they have something of the rich music of Gerard Manley Hopkins of Dylan Thomas” – The New York Herald Tribune
11. Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir
Author: by Joyce Johnson
0140283579
Penguin Books
English
Named one of the 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years by The New York TimesWinner of the National Book Critics Circle AwardAmong the great American literary memoirs of the past century … A riveting portrait of an era … Johnson captures this period with deep clarity and moving insight.
Dwight Garner, The New York TimesIn 1954, Joyce Johnson’s Barnard professor told his class that most women could never have the kinds of experiences that would be worth writing about. Attitudes like that were not at all unusual at a time when good women didn’t leave home or have sex before they married; even those who broke the rules could merely expect to be minor characters in the dramas played by men.
But secret rebels, like Joyce and her classmate Elise Cowen, refused to accept things as they were. As a teenager, Johnson stole down to Greenwich Village to sing folksongs in Washington Square. She was 21 and had started her first novel when Allen Ginsberg introduced her to Jack Kerouac; nine months later she was with Kerouac when the publication of On the Road made him famous overnight.
12. The Portable Jack Kerouac (Penguin Classics)
Author: by Jack Kerouac
English
656 pages
014310506X
The definitive Kerouac collection-now in Penguin Classics To coincide with the 50th anniversary celebration of On the Road, Penguin Classics republishes this landmark collection. The Portable Jack Kerouac made clear the ambition and accomplishment of Kerouac’s “Legend of Duluoz”-the story of his life told in his many “true story” novels.
Featuring selections from Kerouac’s autobiographical fiction, as well as from his poetry, criticism, Buddhist writings, and letters, The Portable Jack Kerouac offers a total immersion in an American master. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world.
With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
13. The Beats: A Graphic History
Author: by Harvey Pekar
Hill and Wang
English
208 pages
In The Beats: A Graphic History, those who were mad to live have come back to life through artwork as vibrant as the Beat movement itself. Told by the comic legend Harvey Pekar, his frequent artistic collaborator Ed Piskor, and a range of artists and writers, including the feminist comic creator Trina Robbins and the Mad magazine artist Peter Kuper, The Beats takes us on a wild tour of a generation that, in the face of mainstream American conformity and conservatism, became known for its determined uprootedness, aggressive addictions, and startling creativity and experimentation.
What began among a small circle of friends in New York and San Francisco during the late 1940s and early 1950s laid the groundwork for a literary explosion, and this striking anthology captures the storied era in all its incarnationsfrom the Benzedrine-fueled antics of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs to the painting sessions of Jay DeFeo’s disheveled studio, from the jazz hipsters to the beatnik chicks, from Chicago’s College of Complexes to San Francisco’s famed City Lights bookstore.
14
Pictures of the Gone World (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)
Author: by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
City Lights Publishers
English
45 pages
Lawrence Ferlinghetti has influenced American culture like few other poets. But in 1955, shortly before he would gain fame as the beloved author of A Coney Island of the Mind, he was an unpublished and mostly unknown poet. He launched City Lights Publishers that year with a five-hundred-copy letterpress edition of Pictures of the Gone World, Number One in the Pocket Poets Series.
A classic collection of early work, Pictures includes many of Ferlinghetti’s most iconic poems. This limited edition sixtieth anniversary hardcover restores the book to its original selection with the addition of eighteen new verses, and is a must for collectors and fans.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a poet, painter, and founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers.
15. Collected Letters, 1944-1967
Author: by Neal Cassady
Penguin Books
English
512 pages
Dave Moore’s work on this collection is simply awesome…. It should become and remain the definitive reference book for Beat scholars forever. Carolyn CassadyNeal 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, immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
This collection brings together more than two hundred letters to Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, and other Beat generation luminaries, as well as correspondence between Neal and his wife, Carolyn. These amazing letters cover Cassady’s life between the ages of 18 and 41 and finish just months before his death in February 1968.
Brilliantly edited by Dave Moore, this unique collection presents the Soul of the Beat Generation in his own wordssometimes touching and tender, sometimes bawdy and hilarious. Here is the real Neal Cassadyraw and uncut.
16. Jack Kerouac: Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur (LOA #262) (Library of America Jack Kerouac Edition)
Author: by Jack Kerouac
Library of America
English
864 pages
An authoritative edition of three Beat novels by the legendary author of On the Road. The third volume in The Library of America’s edition of the writings of Jack Kerouac opens with Visions of Cody, the groundbreaking work originally written in the early 1950s and published posthumously in 1972, in which Kerouac first treats the material later immortalized in On the Road.
In it he moves beyond his early literary models to discover his own unique bop prosody, mixing closely observed description, free-form scats, and transcribed conversation to create an impassioned and hallucinatory portrait of his friend and idol Neal Cassady, here reimagined as Cody Pomeray.
Visions of Gerard (1963) is a deeply moving meditation on Kerouac’s older brother, who died at nine of rheumatic fever, and who for Kerouac became an emblem of saintliness. The intensely focused and harrowing Big Sur (1962) finds fictional alter ego Jack Duluoz returning to California to escape fame and celebrity, a fateful decision that leads to a dangerous affair with Pomeray’s mistress, a nightmarish alcohol-fueled breakdown, and a desperate struggle for sobriety.
