This Is the Beat Generation: New York-San Francisco-Paris
by James Campbell
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Description
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 show more 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. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
After the first hundred pages where the author seems obsessed with the sexual orientation of the Beats, this book became quite interesting. Includes synopsis of the writings, and insights. At one part of the book, the author cleverly uses the cut-up technique on his own notes of quotations, creating a conversation between the writers. A good read and well indexed.
James Campbell's This is the Beat Generation is a good, if perhaps excessively East Coast-centric, overview of the beats. The New York bias means that Gary Snyder, far and away the most impressive of the bunch, gets slighted, though one applauds Campbell's recognition of William Burroughs as the most original of the East Coasters, and perhaps of the whole gang. Campbell's style, too, is attractive. He opts to write interestingly rather than pedantically and never quite falls into the trap of parodying in his own prose the artists about whom he's writing.
This book contains some stories around Howl that I haven't read in other places. See Carl Solomon's reaction, pp. 191-193. Indexed.
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Author Information
13+ Works 524 Members
James Campbell is the author of Exiled in Paris and This Is the Beat Generation. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and was for many years an editor and columnist at the Times Literary Supplement in London.
Common Knowledge
- Original title
- This Is the Beat Generation: New York-San Francisco-Paris
- Original publication date
- 1999
- People/Characters
- Jack Kerouac; Allen Ginsberg; William S. Burroughs
- Important places
- New York, New York, USA; San Francisco, California, USA; Paris, France
- Important events
- Beat Generation
Classifications
- Genres
- Literature Studies and Criticism, Biography & Memoir, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 810.90054 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American literature in English History and criticism of American literature
- LCC
- PS226 .B6 .C36 — Language and Literature American literature American literature By period 20th century
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 117
- Popularity
- 277,712
- Reviews
- 3
- Rating
- (3.76)
- Languages
- English, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 1
