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.

In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school. Immersing herself in Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, di Prima quickly emerged as a renowned poet, an influential editor, and a single mother at a time when this was unheard of. Vividly chronicling the intense, creative cauldron of those years, she recounts her revolutionary relationships and sexuality, and how her experimentation led her to define herself as a woman. What emerges is a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumph of the imagination, and how one woman discovered her role in the world.

This is a revealing look at the events and personalities that defined the Beat Generation, drawing on over three decades of research. Beatniks: A Guide to an American Subculture gets readers past the caricature of the "beatnik" as a goateed, beret-wearing, bongo-playing poseur, drawing on extensive research to show just how profound an impact the beats had on American culture, politics, and literature. Beatniks conveys the complexity, influences, events, and places that shaped the Beat Generation from the late 1940s to the cusp of the 1960s. The book also features a series of essays on specific aspects of the subculture, as well as interviews with Beat Generation luminaries like Allen Ginsberg, Ann Charters, Roy Harper and Michael McClure. Throughout, readers will meet an extraordinary gallery of people both famous—Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady—and lesser known but no less fascinating, including Kenneth Patchen, Lord Buckley, Mort Sahl, Jack Micheline, Lew Welch, Joan Vollmer Adams, and Lenore Kandel. Also included is a detailed glossary with the origins and meanings of the beat lingo.

Loba is a visionary epic quest for the reintegration of the femimine, hailed by many as the great female counterpart to Allen Ginsberg's Howl when the first half appeared in 1978. Now published for the first time in its completed form with new material, Loba, "she-wolf" in Spanish explores the wilderness at the heart of experience, through the archetype of the wolf goddess, elemental symbol of complete self-acceptance.

This memoir by the woman at the center of the Beat movement is “a great book as well as a wonderful autobiography” (The Washington Post Book World). Written by the woman who loved them all—as wife of Cassady, lover of Kerouac, and friend of Ginsberg—this riveting and intimate memoir spans one of the most vital eras in twentieth-century literature and culture, including the explosive successes of Kerouac’s On the Road and Ginsberg’s Howl, the flowering of the Beat movement, and the social revolution of the 1960s. Artist, writer, and designer Carolyn Cassady reveals a side of Neal Cassady rarely seen—that of husband and father, a man who craved respectability, yet could not resist the thrills of a wilder, and ultimately more destructive, lifestyle. “To the familiar history of the Beat generation, Carolyn Cassady adds a proprietary chapter marked with newness, self-exposure, love and poignancy.” —Publishers Weekly “Rich with gossip, historically significant photographs, intimate memories, [and] unpublished letters.” —The New York Times “A poignant recollection—truthful, coarse, and inviting—teeming with the spirit of the men who inspired and symbolized the dreams of a generation.” —San Francisco Chronicle

One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of 2021. Lyrical and unforgettable, part elegy and part memoir, we present a previously unpublished masterpiece from the Beat Generation icon. Simultaneously released with an expanded edition of di Prima's classic Revolutionary Letters on the one-year anniversary of her passing. In the autumn of 1964, Diane di Prima was a young poet living in New York when her dearest friend, dancer, choreographer, and Warhol Factory member, Freddie Herko, leapt from the window of a Greenwich Village apartment to a sudden, dramatic, and tragic death at the age of 29. In her shock and grief, di Prima began a daily practice of writing to Freddie. For a year, she would go to her study each day, light a stick of incense, and type furiously until it burned itself out. The narrative ranges over the decade from 1954—the year di Prima and Herko first met—to 1965, with occasional forays into di Prima's memories of growing up in Brooklyn. Lyrical, elegant, and nakedly honest, Spring and Autumn Annals is a moving tribute to a friendship, and to the extraordinary innovation and accomplishments of the period. Masterfully observed and passionately recorded, it offers a uniquely American portrait of the artist as a young woman in the heyday of bohemian New York City. Praise for Spring and Autumn Annals: "The book is a treasure. Moving between the East Village, San Francisco, Topanga Canyon and Stinson Beach with young children, di Prima's life is unbelievably rich. She studies Greek, writes, prepares dinners and feasts, and co-edits Floating Bear magazine. Diane di Prima is one of the greatest writers of her generation, and this book offers a window into its lives."—Chris Kraus "Extolled by a writer who radically devoted herself to the experiential truth of beauty and intellect, in poverty and grace, in independent dignity, and in the community of Beat consciousness, Diane di Prima's Spring and Autumn Annals arrives as a long-lost charm of illuminated meditations to love, life, death, eros and selflessness. An essential 1960s text of visionary rapaciousness."—Thurston Moore "Freddie Herko wished for a third love before he died; and what a love is in this book's beholding, saying, and release. Di Prima's dancing narrative, propelled and circling at the speed of thought, picking up every name and detailed perception as a rolling tide, fills me with gratitude for the truth of her eye. Nothing gets past it, not even the 'ballet slippers letting in the snow.'"—Ana Božičević "A masterpiece of literary reflection, as quest to archive her dancer friend's life, to make art at all costs and the price dearly paid. Di Prima's observational capacity is profound, her devotion and loyalty assures her deserved place as a national treasure. She generously instills in us the call of poetic remembrance as an act of resistance, and gives voice to the marginalized participants in experimental cultural movements that carried courage in creative rebellion while envisioning freedom of the human spirit. Di Prima’s poetic memoir of the artist journey is a triumph. A must read and reread for years to come."—Karen Finley

In this companion anthology to "The Portable Beat Reader", Charters brings together more than 75 essays, reviews, poems, and sketches that evoke the credos and controversies of the Beat generation writers of the 1950s.

He was the leading light of the Beat Generation writers and the most dynamic author of his time, but Jack Kerouac also had a lifelong passion for music, particularly the mid-century jazz of New York City, the development of which he witnessed first-hand during the 1940s with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk to the fore. The novelist, most famous for his 1957 book On the Road, admired the sounds of bebop and attempted to bring something of their original energy to his own writing, a torrent of semi-autobiographical stories he published between 1950 and his early death in 1969. Yet he was also drawn to American popular music of all kinds � from the blues to Broadway ballads � and when he came to record albums under his own name, he married his unique spoken word style with some of the most talented musicians on the scene. Kerouac's musical legacy goes well beyond the studio recordings he made himself: his influence infused generations of music makers who followed in his work � from singer-songwriters to rock bands. Some of the greatest transatlantic names � Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison and David Bowie, Janis Joplin and Tom Waits, Sonic Youth and Death Cab for Cutie, and many more � credited Kerouac's impact on their output. In Kerouac on Record, we consider how the writer brought his passion for jazz to his prose and poetry, his own record releases, the ways his legacy has been sustained by numerous more recent talents, those rock tributes that have kept his memory alive and some of the scores that have featured in Hollywood adaptations of the adventures he brought to the printed page.

“A thoughtful, intimate memoir of life in the burgeoning movement of new jazz, poetry, and politics . . . in Lower Manhattan in the late 1950s and early 1960s” (Alix Kate Shulman, The Nation). Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who’d been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who’d chosen to cross racial barriers to marry African American poet LeRoi Jones. This is her reminiscence of life in the awakening East Village in the era of the Beats, Black Power, and bohemia. “As the wife of controversial black playwright-poet LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Hettie Cohen, a white Jew from Queens, NY, plunged into the Greenwich Village bohemia of jazz, poetry, leftish politics and underground publishing in the late 1950s. Their life together ended in 1965, partly, she implies, because of separatist pressures on blacks to end their interracial marriages. In this restrained autobiographical mix of introspection and gossip, the author writes of coping with racial prejudice and violence, raising two daughters, and of living in the shadow of her husband. When the couple divorced, she became a children’s book author and poet. The memoir is dotted with glimpses of Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, Franz Kline, among others.” —Publishers Weekly

An anthology of the best of the beats edited by Anne Waldman (who should know) and containing a chronology of the movement from Kerouac to Snyder. The emphasis is on the the poetry and prose excerpts; However, the volume includes brief biographical sketches, an introduction by Ginsberg, a recommended beat vacation guide of the places where the gang passed out or recovered, and more scholarly references. The writers selected for inclusion represent the core of beat: Corso, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Orlovsky, di Prima, Burroughs, Baraka, Ferlinghetti, Kyger, Kandel, Kaufman, Whalen, McClure, and Snyder. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR