Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir
10 best books like Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir (Joyce Johnson): The Dharma Bums, Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg, A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, Go, First Third & Other Writings - Revised & Expanded Edition Together With A New Prologue, Lonesome Traveler, Memoirs of a Beatnik, How I Became Hettie Jones, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg
Two ebullient young men search for Truth the Zen way: from marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam sessions, and "yabyum" in San Francisco's Bohemia, to solitude in the high Sierras and a vigil atop Desolation Peak in Washington State. Published just a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation...
Neal Cassady was a living legend, his dauntless, wild spirit immortalized in the bible of the Beat generation, Jack Kerouac's "On the Road."In this vivid, comic, and wise account, Neal's wife captures the turbulene and raw excitement of her years with Cassady, with Kerouac(her sometime lover), and...
| Author | Lawrence Ferlinghetti |
| ISBN | 0811200418 |
This is one of the best-selling poetry books of all time, and, although that is no guarantee of poetic excellence—after all, Rod McKuen and Martin Farquar Tupper both sold a lot of books in their day—it is a sign that the author had his finger on the pulse of his time, that his work embodies the yearnings...
| Author | Ted Morgan |
| ISBN | 0380708825 |
Anarchist, heroin addict, alcoholic, nihilist, homosexual crusader, and brilliant writer, William S. Burroughs was the patron saint and Prince of Darkness of the Beats of the 1950s. His ground-breaking avant-garde masterpiece NAKED LUNCH shocked the literary world with its graphic descriptions...
| Author | John Clellon Holmes |
| ISBN | 0141188391 |
The novel that launched the beat generation's literary legacy describes the world of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neil Cassady. Published two months before Kerouac began On the Road, Go is the first and most accurate chronicle of the private lives the Beats lived before they became public figures....
| Author | Neal Cassady |
| ISBN | 0872860051 |
Immortalized as Dean Moriarty by Jack Kerouac in his epic novel, On the Road, Neal Cassady was infamous for his unstoppable energy and his overwhelming charm, his savvy hustle and his devil-may-care attitude. A treasured friend and traveling companion of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs,...
| Author | Jack Kerouac |
| ISBN | 0141184906 |
As he roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, Paris and London, Jack Kerouac breathlessly records, in prose of pure poetry, the life of the road. Standing on the engine of a train as it rushes past fields of prickly cactus; witnessing his first bullfight in Mexico while high on opium; catching up with the beat night...
| Author | Diane di Prima |
| ISBN | 0140235396 |
Long regarded as an underground classic for its gritty and unabashedly erotic portrayal of the Beat years, Memoirs of a Beatnik is a moving account of a powerful woman artist coming of age sensually and intellectually in a movement dominated by a small confederacy of men, many of whom she lived with and...
| Author | Hettie Jones |
| ISBN | 0802134963 |
Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and jazz musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who'd been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who'd chosen to cross racial barriers to marry the controversial black poet LeRoi Jones. Theirs was a bohemian...
| Author | Bill Morgan |
| ISBN | 0670037966 |
Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Howl, the first full biography of Allen Ginsberg—from birth to death
Allen Ginsberg was America’s most influential poet since World War II, a figure who was in the vanguard of every popular movement of that time, from the emergence...
| Author | Ann Charters |
| ISBN | 0140151028 |
Beginning in the late 1940s, American literature discovered a four-letter word, and the word was "beat." Beat as in poverty and beatitude, ecstacy 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,...
| Author | Brenda Knight |
| ISBN | 1567312969 |
The Beat Generation created an American revolution in literature and culture that transformed the mid-twentieth century. The Beats helped make literature a democracy. All one needed, they believed, was passion and a love of the written word. The names of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady,...
| Author | Jack Kerouac |
| ISBN | 0141001879 |
On a blind date in Greenwich Village set up by Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson (then Joyce Glassman) met Jack Kerouac in January 1957, nine months before he became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road. She was an adventurous, independent-minded twenty-one-year-old; Kerouac was already...
| Author | Gerald Nicosia |
| ISBN | 0520085698 |
In 1969 Jack Kerouac died a premature death. While his legendary lifestyle and unique creative talent made him a hero in his lifetime, his literary influence has grown steadily since. With Memory Babe (a childhood nickname honoring Kerouac's feats of memory), Gerald Nicosia gives us a complete biography...
| Author | Jack Kerouac |
| ISBN | 0140234446 |
Thirty years after his death, popular and academic interest in the life and work of Jack Kerouac have reached an all-time high. The first volume of his selected letters, edited by renowned biographer and Beat scholar Ann Charters, was widely regarded as a vital and momentous contribution to Kerouac...
| Author | Barry Miles |
| ISBN | 0805060448 |
More than forty years after the publication of On the Road, Jack Kerouac is more widely read and revered by a new generation than ever before. Why this is so is the subject of Barry Miles's fresh and revealing portrait of the writer who is the acknowledged leader of the Beats, the group of writers that included...
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial
| Author | Janet Malcolm |
| ISBN | 0300167466 |
"Astringent and absorbing. . . . Iphigenia in Forest Hills casts, from its first pages, a genuine spell — the kind of spell to which Ms. Malcolm’s admirers (and I am one) have become addicted."—Dwight Garner, New York Times
"She couldn't have done it and she must have done it." This is the...
