This Is the Beat Generation: New York-San Francisco-Paris - Softcover

"Literary biography serves the delightful function of providing its reader with a little lurid gossip, if not a critical history. Thankfully, James Campbell dishes out plenty of both in "This Is the Beat Generation, wherein he chronicles one of the most (in)famous literary movements of the twentieth century. This book nicely illustrates, in a tone neither worshipful nor deploring, how resolutely the Beat movement was borne out of friendship, and is often less tiresome than reading actual beat writing."--"Flaunt magazine

Beginning in New York in 1944, James Campbell finds the leading members of what was to become the Beat Generation in the shadows of madness and criminality. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs had each seen the insides of a mental hospital and a prison by the age of thirty. A few months after they met, another member of their circle committed a murder that involved Kerouac and Burroughs as material witnesses.

This book charts the transformation of these experiences into literature, and a literary movement that spread across the globe. From "The First Cut-Up"--the murder in New York in 1944--we end up in Paris in 1960 with William Burroughs at the Beat Hotel, experimenting with the technique that made him notorious, what Campbell calls "The Final Cut-Up."

In between, we move to San Francisco, where Ginsberg gave the first public reading of Howl. We discover Burroughs in Mexico City and Tangiers; the French background to the Beats; the Buddhist influence on Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and others; the "Muses" Herbert Huncke and Neal Cassady; the tortuous history of On the Road; and the black ancestry of the white hipster.