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The Portable Beat Reader

Ann Charters author Ann Charters editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd

Published:25th May '06

Should be back in stock very soon

The Portable Beat Reader cover

Beginning in the late 1940's, American literature discovered a four-letter word, and the word was "beat." Beat as in poverty and beatitude, ecstasy 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; the wild, Whitmanesque poetry of Allen Ginsberg; and the lumberjack Zen of Gary Snyder.
The Portable Beat Reader collects the most significant writing of these and fellow members (and spiritual descendants) of the Beat Generation, including Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Bob Dylan, Leroi Jones, and Michael McClure. In poetry, fiction, essays, song lyrics, letters, and memoirs, it captures the triumphant rudeness, energy, and exhilaration of a movement that swept through American letters with hurricane force.

"A deft and definitive collection. It catches the flavor of playful, serious defiance of the whole generation." —Gary Snyder

ISBN: 9780142437537

Dimensions: 195mm x 128mm x 30mm

Weight: 500g

688 pages