Since 1955, City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco has published over 230 titles and its 1,500 authors include Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Hilda Doolittle, Allen Ginsberg, Goethe, Walt Whitman, Gregory Corso, and Karl Marx. Provides complete information on all City Lights publications from 1955 through 1990.

An unparalleled literary mix tape that brings together the subversive works of Henry Miller, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac, and many others Who were the original hipsters? In this dazzling collection, Glenn O’Brien provides a kaleidoscopic guided tour through the margins and subterranean tribes of mid-twentieth century America—the worlds of jazz, of disaffected postwar youth, of those alienated by racial and sexual exclusion, of outlaws and drug users creating their own dissident networks. Whether labeled as Bop or Beat or Punk, these outsider voices ignored or suppressed by the mainstream would merge and recombine in unpredictable ways, and change American culture forever. To read The Cool School is to experience the energies of that vortex. Drawing on memoirs, poems, novels, comedy routines, letters, essays, and song lyrics, O’Brien's collection brings together Henry Miller, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac, Diane di Prima, Lenny Bruce, William S. Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Annie Ross, Norman Mailer, Terry Southern, Andy Warhol, Lester Bangs, and dozens of others, including such legendary figures as Beat avatar Neal Cassady, jazz memoirist Babs Gonzales, inspired comic improviser Lord Buckley, no-holds-barred essayist Seymour Krim, and underground filmmaker Jack Smith. His one-of-a-kind anthology recreates an unforgettable era in all its hallucinatory splendor: transgressive, raucous, unruly, harrowing, and often subversively hilarious.

"In a single year, 2003, the poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti won a lifetime achievement award from the Author's Guild, was awarded the Frost Medal by the Poetry Society of America, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his renowned City Lights Bookstore. Now, instead of sleeping on such laurel, this elder maverick of American poetry "lights out for the territories" with Book I of his own born-in-the U.S.A. epic, Americus. Describing his work as "part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epic--a descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction, lyric and political," Ferlinghetti combines "universal texts, snatches of song, words or phrases, murmuring of love or hate, from Lotte Lenya to the latest soul singer, sayings and shibboleths from Yogi Berra to the National Anthem, the Gettysburg Address or the Ginsburg Address, that haunt our nocturnal imagination." This sit-up-and-take-notice work breaks fertile ground in the grand tradition of Walt Whitman, W. C. Williams, Charles Olson, and Ezra Pound, as Ferlinghetti cruises our literary and political landscapes, past and present, to articulate the unique voice of America and create an auto-biography of American consciousness."--book jacket.

Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Lovetells the history of tricksters who challenged the boundaries of doctrine to light the way to a more peaceful and playful society.

A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes recognizes that change is a driving force in all the arts. It covers major trends in music, dance, theater, film, visual art, sculpture, and performance art--as well as architecture, science, and culture.

The coverage of this book ranges from Jack Kerouac's tales of freedom-seeking Bohemian youth to the frenetic paintings of Jackson Pollock, including 60 years of the Beat Generation and the artists of the Age of Spontaneity. Beat Culture captures in a single volume six decades of cultural and countercultural expression in the arts and society. It goes beyond other works, which are often limited to Beat writers like William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, and Michael McClure, to cover a wide range of musicians, painters, dramatists, filmmakers, and dancers who found expression in the Bohemian movement known as the Beat Generation. Top scholars from the United States, England, Holland, Italy, and China analyze a vast array of topics including sexism, misogny, alcoholism, and drug abuse within Beat circles; the arrest of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti on obscenity charges; Beat dress and speech; and the Beat "pad." Through more than 250 entries, which travel from New York to New Orleans, from San Francisco to Mexico City, students, scholars, and those interested in popular culture will taste the era's rampant freedom and experimentation, explore the impact of jazz on Beat writings, and discover how Beat behavior signaled events such as the sexual revolution, the peace movement, and environmental awareness.

Did you know that less than two weeks after Jack Kerouac reported to the Newport, RI U.S. Naval Training Station (the same month that the German 6th Army was surrendering at Stalingrad), he was discharged, diagnosed with a “Constitutional Psychopathic State, Schizoid Personality”? That just a few months later, William Burroughs moved from Chicago to New York, where he took a small apartment at 69 Bedford Street and began a heroin addiction that was to last until 1956? That meanwhile, Gregory Corso, thirteen and homeless, was being arrested for petty larceny, while Hubert Selby, Jr., fifteen, joined the Merchant Marines? And that the very same year, Allen Ginsberg, a new graduate from Eastside High School in Patterson, New Jersey, began his first semester at Columbia University, where he first made the acquaintance of Herbert Gold and Jack Kerouac? Packed with month-by-month and week-by-week anecdotes, The Ultimate, Illustrated Beats Chronology is a meticulous timeline detailing the life events and literary accomplishments of the writers who became known as the Beat Generation. Covering an entire century and then some, this beautifully illustrated volume is certain to be an invaluable resource for anyone curious about the Beat Generation.

This text presents a comprehensive and up-to-date reference work on popular music, from the early 20th century to the present day.

Entertaining, highly readable book pulses with the vernacular of young Americans from the end of the 19th century to the present. Alphabetical listings for each decade, plus fascinating sidebars about language and culture.