The Beat Generation
Whistlestop Bookshop opened in 1985. When I think about writers or categories or particular books that have sold steadily, without flagging, for over 30 years, I think I learn about my own philosophy of bookselling, I learn about my customers over time and generations, and I learn about the literature. Sometimes it is a book (Goodnight, Moon, say, or Killer Angels), sometimes it is a category (science fiction/fantasy or nature guides), and sometimes a particular author (Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Austen). I am both surprised and pleased that the Beats have sold since the beginning and show no signs of slowing down.
The history of the Beat Generation is complex and absorbing. Think of analogies being the Transcendentalists or the Lost Generation. Briefly and unfairly summarized, think of a small group of writers from very different backgrounds meeting at Columbia University after World War Two, creating the beginnings of a network that was nurtured in New York City but soon found simultaneous developments in San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest.
The Beats recognized and valued spontaneity, non-conformity, spiritual quests outside of social structures, suspicion of materialism, the intimate conversation between music (especially jazz) and language, and a burning, sometimes self-destructive, passion for freedom.
As you can see in our offerings here, Jack Kerouac was a central figure, as were Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Other names are here, too -- William S. Burroughs, Jr., Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Carolyn Cassady. I will add titles and writers as I remember the associations, and as new critical or historical evaluations are published. Enjoy what my customers have been celebrating for three decades plus now!
Jack Kerouac: Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur
Jack Kerouac: Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur
This third Library of America volume devoted to the writings of Jack Kerouac presents three powerful works, each highlighting different aspects of his turbulent life and incandescent literary gift. “My work comprises one vast book like Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past,” Kerouac wrote in a comment on Visions of Cody, “except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed.” Completed in 1952, Visions of Cody was not published in full until 1972, three years after Kerouac’s death. Perhaps the most experimental of all his books, it is the other masterpiece drawn from the experiences and encounters behind On the Road, centered on an impassioned and hallucinatory portrait of his friend and idol Neal Cassady, here reimagined as Cody Pomeray. Blending the real and the imaginary, Kerouac moves beyond his early literary models into his own unique “bop prosody,” mixing closely observed descriptions of people and places, free-form scats on everything from Denver nightlife to the filming of a Joan Crawford movie, transcribed conversation, and breathless narration of what was happening in his life as the manuscript was being written. “What I’m beginning to discover now,” he wrote while conceiving this extraordinary book, “is something beyond the novel and beyond the arbitrary confines of the story. . . . I’m making myself seek to find the wild form, that can grow with my wild heart.” Written in a matter of weeks just after Christmas 1955 and published in 1963, Visions of Gerard—“my best most serious sad and true book yet”—is a meditation on Kerouac’s older brother, who died at age nine of rheumatic fever, and who became for him an emblem of innocence and saintliness. As he delves into memories of early childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac conjures in rich and sensuous detail the French-Canadian community in which he grew up, exuberantly sketching scenes of home and church and tavern, a vanished world recaptured in luminous prose. The intensely focused and sometimes despairing Big Sur(1962), which was composed in just ten days, chronicles a 1960 trip to California intended as a restorative return but culminating in a nightmarish breakdown that Kerouac unflinchingly describes. Populated by a cast including thinly disguised literary figures such as the poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure, Big Sur is above all a laceratingly frank self-portrait of a man who finds his mind coming undone even in the midst of inspiring natural beauty at the edge of the Pacific.