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

James Campbell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520230337 ISBN 13: 9780520230330

Publisher: University of California Press, 2001

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

As the leading members of the Beat Generation are increasingly incorporated into the mainstream of the literary canon, the time is clearly ripe for a carefully researched cultural history of the movement, and this is precisely what James Campbell has provided in his excellent book This is the Beat Generation. In a tour-de-force first section, Campbell reveals the immersion in madness and murder which first united Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in the mid 1940s. Campbell offers a fascinating account of the literary development of all three writers, tracing the complex relations of all three to sex, drugs and crime. The book charts the domestic, artistic and geographical changes of all three writers, focusing on Kerouac's emotional paralysis, Ginsberg's struggle with his sexuality, and Burroughs' general weirdness. The most illuminating sections of the book are those which draw in the peripheral friends, lovers and muses which came to define the Beat Generation, as well as the sections on the development of On the Road, Howl and Other Poems and Naked Lunch. The book is painstakingly researched, and will be invaluable to anyone seriously interested in the Beats, as well as those who want to dip in for some great stories, but does lack a sense of the emotional relationships between its three central characters. Ending as it does in 1960, the book also cries out for a sequel which deals with the 60s and 70s. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

"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

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0520230337
• ISBN 13: 9780520230330
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 350