Rimbaud, Arthur. Illuminations
———. A Season in Hell
Solomon, Carl. Mishaps, Perhaps. San Francisco: City Lights, 1966.
———. More Mishaps. San Francisco: City Lights, 1968.
Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West
Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1958.
———. Paterson, Book 3. New York: New Directions, 1949.
———. Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems. New York: New Directions, 1962.
———. “Symposium: The Beat Poets,” Wagner Literary Magazine, no. 1 (Spring 1959).
Yeats, William Butler. A Vision
Allen Ginsberg’s Reading List for
“A Literary History of the
Beat Generation”
Allen, Donald, and George F. Butterick, eds. The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised.
Baraka, Amiri. Selected Poetry.
Burroughs, William S. The Burroughs File.
Burroughs, William S. Junky [Junkie].
Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch.
Burroughs, William S. Nova Express.
Burroughs, William S. Nova Express (paperback includes a version of “Twilight’s Last Gleamings”).
Burroughs, William S. Queer.
Burroughs, William S. The Soft Machine.
Burroughs, William S. The Ticket That Exploded.
Burroughs, William S. The Wild Boys.
Burroughs, William S., and Ginsberg, Allen. The Yage Letters.
Cassady, Neal. The First Third and Other Writings.
Corso, Gregory. The American Express.
Corso, Gregory. Elegiac Feelings American.
Corso, Gregory. Gasoline.
Corso, Gregory. The Happy Birthday of Death.
Corso, Gregory. Long Live Man.
Corso, Gregory. Mindfield.
Creeley, Robert. Collected Poems 1945–1975.
di Prima, Diane. Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems.
Dylan, Bob. Tarantula.
Dylan, Bob. Writings and Drawings.
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. Endless Life: Selected Poems.
Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book.
Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems, 1947–1980.
Huncke, Herbert. The Evening Sun Turned Crimson.
Huncke, Herbert. Guilty of Everything.
Kerouac, Jack. Big Sur.
Kerouac, Jack. Desolation Angels.
Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums.
Kerouac, Jack. Heaven and Other Poems.
Kerouac, Jack. Last Words.
Kerouac, Jack. Lonesome Traveler.
Kerouac, Jack. Mexico City Blues.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road.
Kerouac, Jack. Pic.
Kerouac, Jack. Pomes All Sizes.
Kerouac, Jack. Scattered Poems.
Kerouac, Jack. Scripture of the Golden Eternity.
Kerouac, Jack. The Town and the City.
Kerouac, Jack. Vanity of Duluoz.
Kerouac, Jack. Visions of Cody.
Kyger, Joanne. The Japan and India Journals, 1960–64.
Lamantia, Philip. Selected Poems, 1943–1966.
McClure, Michael. Selected Poems.
Orlovsky, Peter. Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs.
Orlovsky, Peter. Unpublished Letters and Journals (ed. David Greenberg and Paul Rickert).
Plimpton, George, ed. Writers at Work, 3rd Series.
Snyder, Gary. Myths and Texts.
Snyder, Gary. Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems.
Solomon, Carl. Emergency Messages: An Autobiographical Miscellany.
Solomon, Carl. Mishaps, Perhaps.
Solomon, Carl. More Mishaps.
Welch, Lew. Ring of Bone: Collected Poems.
Whalen, Philip. On Bear’s Head.
Wieners, John. Cultural Affairs in Boston.
Wieners, John. Selected Poems, 1958–1984.
Articles
Ginsberg, Allen. “A Definition of the Beat Generation.”
Kerouac, Jack. “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.”
Kerouac, Jack. “Origins of the Beat Generation.”
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to a number of people and institutions who have helped make this book possible. The Allen Ginsberg Trust led by Peter Hale and Bob Rosenthal have once again been exceptional in their help. Without their assistance, these tapes would never have been discovered, preserved, or transcribed.
Allen Ginsberg’s agent at the Andrew Wylie Agency, Jeff Posternak, became as devoted to the project as I was and he helped secure the interest of the Grove Press. At Grove Atlantic Morgan Entrekin, Peter Blackstock, Judy Hottensen, Nicole Nyhan, and Julia Berner-Tobin have been perfect editors and advisors and have guided the book through the various stages of publication.
Naropa University with Judy and Charles Lief at the helm are the keepers of the Ginsberg flame and have carefully overseen the preservation and distribution of these and thousands of other tapes of faculty lectures. William Gargan, librarian at Brooklyn College, personally recorded Ginsberg’s lectures there and generously made them available to my research for which I am eternally grateful. Stanford University, where Ginsberg’s personal archive is maintained, also provided several tapes which helped fill in gaps in the series.
In addition to these, the estates of Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and John Clellon Holmes have been most cooperative in allowing us to quote from the original sources that inspired Ginsberg. James Grauerholz, John Sampas, Raymond Foye, and Sheri Langerman-Baird each deserve singular acknowledgment.
I am grateful to Anne Waldman for providing the excellent foreword to this book. She taught with Ginsberg at Naropa for more than twenty years and knew his classroom manner better than anyone alive. I appreciate her taking the time out of a very hectic schedule to help introduce Ginsberg to a new generation of readers.
And finally I want to express my unbounded gratitude to Judy Matz, who nurtured this and all my work and never once complained as I played, and re-played, and re-re-played hundreds of hours of tapes, in an attempt to capture each and every word. Her patience is never ending, as is my love and appreciation for her.
Notes
1. Holmes, John Clellon. “This Is the Beat Generation,” New York Times magazine (November 16, 1952).
2. [Kerouac, Jack] Jean-Louis. “Jazz of the Beat Generation,” New World Writing (New York: New American Library, 1955), pp. 7–16.
3. Huncke, Herbert. The Evening Sun Turned Crimson (Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley Editions, 1980).
4. Kerouac, Jack. “Origins of the Beat Generation,” Playboy, vol. 6, no. 6 (June 1959), pp. 31–32+.
5. O’Neil, Paul. “The Only Rebellion Around,” Life, vol. 47, no. 22 (November 30, 1959), pp. 114–16+.
6. Aronowitz, Alfred G. “The Beat Generation, Parts 1–12,” New York Post (March 9–22, 1959).
7. Ginsberg, Allen. “A Definition of Beat Generation,” Friction, vol. 1, no. 2/3 (Winter 1982), pp. 50–52.
8. Biographies of all the main characters of the Beat Generation are readily available.
9. These lines are from William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.”
10. Kerouac, Jack. “Origins of the Beat Generation,” in On the Road (New York: Viking Critical Library, 1979), p. 359.
11. Ibid., p. 358.
12. Ibid., pp. 358–59.
13. Ibid., pp. 359–60.
14. Ibid., p. 361.
15. Ibid., p. 362.
16. Ibid., pp. 362–63.
17. The full quote is “To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life,” and it is
taken from Walter Pater’s book The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873).
18. Kerouac, “Origins of the Beat Generation,” p. 363.
19. Ibid., p. 364.
20. Ibid., pp. 364–65.
21. Podhoretz, Norman. “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” Partisan Review, no. 25 (Spring 1958), pp. 305–18.
22. Kerouac, “Origins of the Beat Generation,” pp. 366–67.
23. Lipton, Lawrence. The Holy Barbarians (New York: Julian Messner, 1959).
24. Holmes, “This Is the Beat Generation.”
25. The Sea Is My Brother was eventually published by Da Capo Press in 2011.
26. Kerouac, Jack. Vanity of Duluoz (New York: Coward-McCann, 1968), p. 125.
27. Jack Kerouac attended Horace Mann prep school in the Bronx from 1939 to 1940.
28. Bickford’s was a popular and inexpensive all-night cafeteria once located in New York City at 225 W. 42nd Street.
29. Horn & Hardart was a popular chain of automats in New York City during the 1940s and ’50s.
30. The Angler or Angle Bar once stood on the corner of Eighth Avenue and West 43rd Street.
31. The Apollo Theatre was located on West 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, not to be confused with the more famous Apollo Theater on 125th Street in Harlem.
32. Kerouac, Jack. Lonesome Traveler (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), pp. 106–7.
33. Le Pavillion was one of the most elegant French restaurants in New York City.
34. Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler, pp. 107–8.
35. During World War II the navy developed the V-12 program to train officers on college campuses including Columbia.
36. These lines are from William Butler Yeats’s poem “Among School Children.”
37. Dr. Mabuse was the fictional villain in several films made by Fritz Lang.
38. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, pp. 41–42.
39. Ibid., p. 34.
40. Ibid., p. 44.
41. Ibid., p. 47.
42. Ibid., pp. 62–63.
43. Ibid., p. 63.
44. Ibid., pp. 86–89.
45. Ibid., p. 95.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., p. 105.
48. Ibid., pp. 105–6.
49. Ibid., pp. 106–7.
50. Ibid., p. 109.
51. Ibid., pp. 122–23.
52. Ibid., p. 125.
53. Lucien Carr disliked publicity and avoided interviews, asking his friends to respect his privacy.
54. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, pp. 163–64.
55. Ibid., p. 169.
56. Ibid., pp. 176–77.
57. Ibid., p. 184.
58. Ibid., pp. 189–90.
59. Ibid., p. 195.
60. Kerouac, Jack. The Town and the City (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950), p. 3.
61. Ibid., pp. 10–11.
62. Ibid., pp. 11–12.
63. Ibid., p. 13.
64. Ibid., pp. 13–14.
65. Ibid., pp. 14–15.
66. Ibid., p. 15.
67. Andrei Petrovich Versilov is a character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Raw Youth.
68. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, pp. 205–7.
69. Ibid., p. 7.
70. Ibid., pp. 207–8.
71. Ibid., pp. 211–12.
72. Ibid., pp. 212–13.
73. Ibid., pp. 217–18.
74. Ibid., p. 220.
75. Kerouac, Jack. Visions of Cody (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), pp. 64–65.
76. Ibid., pp. 47–48.
77. Ibid., p. 48.
78. Ibid., p. 57.
79. Ibid., p. 80.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid., pp. 81–82.
82. Ibid., pp. 67–70.
83. Ibid., p. 398.
84. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, p. 273.
85. Kerouac, Visions of Cody, p. 3.
86. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz, p. 280.
87. This was the original 1938 manuscript version of “Twilight’s Last Gleamings.” A slightly revised version was published as “Gave Proof Through the Night” in Burroughs’s book Nova Express (New York: Grove Press, 1964).
88. In the summer of 1944, Lucien Carr stabbed and killed his friend David Kammerer in a park near the Columbia University campus. Carr was charged with manslaughter and sentenced to an upstate reformatory where he spent two years.
89. William Burroughs killed his wife, Joan, in Mexico City on September 6, 1951, during a drunken game of William Tell. He fled the country to avoid a prison sentence.
90. This is a line from Arthur Rimbaud’s long prose poem A Season in Hell.
91. Burroughs, William S. Junkie (New York: Ace Books, 1953), p. 11.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., p. 19.
94. Ibid., p. 20.
95. Ibid., p. 22.
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid., p. 23.
98. Ibid., pp. 23–24.
99. Ibid., p. 26.
100. Ibid., p. 31.
101. Ibid., pp. 33–34.
102. Ibid., pp. 39–40.
103. Ibid., p. 54.
104. Ibid., p. 71.
105. Ibid., p. 73.
106. Ibid., pp. 99–100.
107. Ibid., p. 107.
108. Ibid.
109. Ibid., p. 120.
110. Ibid., pp. 124–25.
111. Burroughs, William, and Allen Ginsberg. The Yage Letters (San Francisco: City Lights, 1963), pp. 13–14.
112. Ibid., pp. 14–15.
113. Ibid., p. 19.
114. Ibid., p. 42.
115. Ibid., pp. 47–48.
116. Ibid., p. 49.
117. Burroughs, William S. Queer (New York: Viking, 1985), pp. xiv–xv.
118. Ibid., p. xvi.
119. Ibid., pp. xvii–xix.
120. Burroughs, William, and Brion Gysin. The Exterminator (San Francisco: Auerhahn Press, 1960), p. 5.
121. Burroughs, William S. The Ticket That Exploded (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 27.
122. Ibid.
123. Ibid., pp. 27–28.
124. Ginsberg, Allen, and Neal Cassady. As Ever (Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts, 1977), p. 61.
125. This is a reference to a long letter that Neal Cassady had written to Jack Kerouac, which was referred to as “the Joan letter” because it talked about Neal’s relationship with a woman named Joan.
126. Ginsberg and Cassady, As Ever, pp. 63–64.
127. Ibid., p. 71.
128. Ibid., pp. 85–86.
129. Ibid., p. 88.
130. Ibid., pp. 90–91.
131. Ibid., p. 108.
132. Ibid., p. 109.
133. Ibid., p. 113.
134. Kerouac, Jack. Scattered Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1971), pp. 8–9.
135. Kerouac, Jack. “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Black Mountain Review (Autumn 1957).
136. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road (New York: Viking, 1957), p. 10.
137. Ibid., p. 37.
138. Ibid., pp. 77–78.
139. Ibid., p. 83.
140. Ibid., pp. 102–3.
141. Ibid., p. 106.
142. Ibid., p. 107.
143. Ibid., p. 124.
144. Ibid., p. 129.
145. Ibid., pp. 144–45.
146. Ibid., pp. 153–54.
147. Ibid., p. 157.
148. Ibid., p. 170.
149. Ibid., p. 171.
150. Ibid., p. 172.
151. Ibid., pp. 172–73.
152. Ibid., p. 178.
153. Ibid., p. 180.
154. Ibid., p. 181.
155. Ib
id., p. 190.
156. Ibid., pp. 194–95.
157. Ibid., p. 205.
158. Ibid., p. 206.
159. Ibid., pp. 212–13.
160. Ibid., p. 236.
161. Ibid., p. 269.
162. Ibid., p. 273.
163. Ibid., pp. 276–77.
164. Ibid., pp. 280–81.
165. Ibid., p. 302.
166. Ibid., pp. 309–10.
167. Kerouac, Jack. [letter, May 18, 1952], Unspeakable Visions of the Individual, no. 8 (1978), p. 141.
168. Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), pp. 159–60.
169. Kerouac, Visions of Cody, pp. 18–19.
170. Ibid., p. 21.
171. Ibid., pp. 31–33.
172. Corso, Gregory. Mindfield (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989), p. 5.
173. Ibid., p. 6.
174. Corso, Gregory. Gasoline / Vestal Lady on Brattle (San Francisco: City Lights, 1976), p. 57.
175. Corso, Mindfield, p. 3.
176. Ibid., p. 4.
177. Corso, Gasoline / Vestal Lady on Brattle, pp. 66–67.
178. Ibid., p. 71.
179. Corso, Mindfield, pp. 8–11.
180. Corso, Gasoline / Vestal Lady on Brattle, p. 13.
181. Corso, Mindfield, p. 39.
182. Ibid., p. 34.
183. Corso, Gasoline / Vestal Lady on Brattle, pp. 19–21.
184. Corso, Mindfield, p. 37.
185. Ibid., p. 42.
186. Ibid., p. 30.
187. Ibid.
188. Ibid., p. 31.
189. Ibid.
190. Corso, Gregory. The Happy Birthday of Death (New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 21
191. Corso, Mindfield, p. 60.
192. Ibid., pp. 65–69.
193. Ibid., pp. 48–49.
194. In point of fact the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr took place on July 11, 1804, not winter at all.
195. The editor has been unable to find any reference to Israel Hans in historical documents.
196. Anthemion is a floral design used in ancient Greek and Roman architecture.
197. The Plaka is a neighborhood in Athens located just below the ancient Acropolis.
198. Corso, Mindfield, pp. 87–92.
199. Ibid., pp. 199–200.
200. Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947–1997 (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 13.
201. Stagirite; Aristotle was a native of Stagira.
202. Ginsberg, Allen. The Gates of Wrath (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1972), pp. 46–47.
The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats Page 39
