The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes of American Poetry explores correspondences amongst the Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers, two of most well-known and influential groups of poets in the 1950s. The division of writers as Beat or Black Mountain has hindered our understanding of the ways that these poets developed from mutual influences, benefitted from direct relations, and overlapped their boundaries. This collection of academic essays refines and adds context to Beat Studies and Black Mountain Studies by investigating the groups’ intersections and undercurrents. One goal of the book is to deconstruct the Beat and Black Mountain labels in order to reveal the shifting and fluid relationships among the individual poets who developed a revolutionary poetics in the 1950s and beyond. Taken together, these essays clarify the radical experimentation with poetics undertaken by these poets.

John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of Kerouac’s life they were—in Holmes’s words—“Brother Souls.” Both were neophyte novelists, hungry for literary fame but just as hungry to find a new way of responding to their experiences in a postwar American society that for them had lost its direction. Late one night as they sat talking, Kerouac spontaneously created the term “Beat Generation” to describe this new attitude they felt stirring around them. Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation is the remarkable chronicle of this cornerstone friendship and the life of John Clellon Holmes. From 1948 to 1951, when Kerouac’s wanderings took him back to New York, he and Holmes met almost daily. Struggling to find a form for the novel he intended to write, Kerouac climbed the stairs to the apartment in midtown Manhattan where Holmes lived with his wife to read the pages of Holmes’s manuscript for the novel Go as they left the typewriter. With the pages of Holmes’s final chapter still in his mind, he was at last able to crack his own writing dilemma. In a burst of creation in April 1951, he drew all the materials he had been gathering into the scroll manuscript of On the Road. Biographer Ann Charters was close to John Clellon Holmes for more than a decade. At his death in 1988 she was one of a handful of scholars allowed access to the voluminous archive of letters, journals, and manuscripts Holmes had been keeping for twenty-five years. In that mass of material waited an untold story. These two ambitious writers, Holmes and Kerouac, shared days and nights arguing over what writing should be, wandering from one explosive party to the next, and hanging on the new sounds of bebop. Through the pages of Holmes’s journals, often written the morning after the events they recount, Charters discovered and mined an unparalleled trove describing the seminal figures of the Beat Generation: Holmes, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and their friends and lovers.

Beatdom is a magazine for all fans of Beat Generation literature. This is the very first issue of Beatdom, containing interviews with Barry Gifford, Paul Krassner, Ken Babbs and Zane Kesey. We also have a talented group of writers and photographers, who have put together a magazine with features relating the Beat Generation to Buddhism, Bob Dylan, Hunter S Thompson and Walt Whitman; and guides to Beat books, websites and stories.

The fourth issue of the hugely popular Beatdom magazine includes poetry by hiphop star Scroobius Pip, essays by Kerouac expert Dave Moore, interviews with Gary Snyder and Carolyn Cassady, and the memoirs and unpublished photographs of Allen Ginsberg's assistant.

Poetry. Art. Edited by Tate Swindell. This new collection features poems, ephemera, and art work from Beat Poet legend Jack Micheline. It is the largest compilation of unpublished material since Micheline's death in 1998, and includes poems, post cards, photographs and images of many pieces of original artwork by the author.

First published in 1956, Allen Ginsberg's Howl is a prophetic masterpiece—an epic raging against dehumanizing society that overcame censorship trials and obscenity charges to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. This annotated version of Ginsberg's classic is the poet's own re-creation of the revolutionary work's composition process—as well as a treasure trove of anecdotes, an intimate look at the poet's writing techniques, and a veritable social history of the 1950s.

High White Notes is the first in-depth analysis of the complete writings of Hunter S. Thompson, whose Gonzo journalism was an odd fusion of fact and fiction that garnered widespread adoration but perhaps for all the wrong reasons.

The Haunted Life is the coming-of-age story of Peter Martin, a college track star determined to idle away what he knows will be one of his last innocent summers in his tranquil New England home town. But with the war escalating in Europe and his two closest friends both plotting their escapes, he realises how sheltered his upbringing has been. As he surveys the competing influences of his youth, he struggles to determine what might lead to an intellectually authentic life. The Haunted Life is ultimately a meditation on intellectual truth, male friendship and the desire for movement - all themes that would dominate Kerouac's later work.

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 loved. Filled with anecdotes about her adventures in New York City, Diane di Prima's memoir shows her learning to "raise her rebellion into art," and making her way toward literary success. Memoirs of a Beatnik offers a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumphs of the imagination.

This is the poetry of the San Francisco Renaissance of the 50s, reconsidered as literature: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's lyrical cityscapes, Jack Kerouac's blues and haikus, Allen Ginsberg's saxophone prophecies, Gregory Corso's obsessive odes, John Wieners' true confessions, Michael McClure's physical hymns, Philip Lamantia's surreal passions, Gary Snyder's work songs, Philip Whalen's loose sutras, Lew Welch's hermit visions, David Meltzer's improvisations and discoveries, and Bob Kaufman's jazz meditations. Scholarship dances with poetic intuition and insight. Skip the footnotes, or not. Larry Beckett generates where it's at, cats. -Dan Barth, poet and Beat scholar, author of Fast Women Beautiful: Zen, Beat, Baseball Poems I was genuinely knocked-out by this] book. A generous & insightful work on poets writ w/ a poet's mindful heart. Because of its timeline, I assume (& hope) there will be more. It would seem immodest for me to blast a blurb, but my enthusiasm is genuine & immediate. -David Meltzer Larry Beckett's vivid, highly readable testament to the Beats provides a useful introduction to this wild-side school-out-of-school of American poetry, identifying the movement's twentieth century "oral scripture" (to quote his essay on Philip Whalen) as enduring Gospel for the Millennium. - Tom Clark poet, author of Jack Kerouac: A Biography Oh sure, it's all these poems by poets whose names sing in our blood as the heart pumps; but it took Larry Beckett to marry ink to paper in such a way that it appears the words are written on wedding sheets. - Robin Rule poet, publisher of Beckett's Songs and Sonnets "4.5 out of 5 stars... an intriguing exploration of the history of Beats and their poetry." - Portland Book Review