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!
The Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground
The Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground
In this dazzling collection, Glenn O’Brien provides a kaleidoscopic guided tour through the subterranean scenes and tribes that gave birth to cool: the worlds of jazz, of disaffected postwar youth, of the racially and sexually excluded, of outlaws and drug users creating their own dissident networks. Whether labeled Bop or Beat or Punk, these outsider voices would merge and recombine in surprising ways, changing America 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 creates an unparalleled literary mixtape spanning decades of tumultuous and exuberant change. In the Forties, the era when the strands of hip begin to converge, Miles Davis joins Charlie Parker in a revolutionary musical collaboration that also signals a revolution in attitude; Henry Miller, back from Paris, dissects the grotesque hypocrisies of a Hollywood dinner party; and Beat avatar Neal Cassady writes to Jack Kerouac about his life on the road.
The Fifties sees the flowering of the Beats, in such voices as Kerouac, Diane di Prima, and Gregory Corso; Chandler Brossard and Terry Southern take sharp and satirical looks at the burgeoning hipster culture; Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl create a new outspoken form of stand-up comedy; and comedy maverick Del Close provides a glossary of “How to Talk Hip.” The cultural maelstrom of the Sixties and Seventies finds expression in the apocalyptic cut-ups of William S. Burroughs, the free-form fictions of Ishmael Reed and Richard Brautigan, and Andy Warhol’s reel-to-reel transcription of a speed-fueled night world. Bob Dylan recreates the Village folk scene, Ed Sanders celebrates poetic orgies, and Hunter S. Thompson plunges into the twisted heart of Las Vegas.
The Cool School tracks as well the succeeding generations of writers who have extended the terrain of their underground predecessors and continue to push against the enticements of mainstream America, including such contemporaries as Nick Tosches, Iris Owens, Lynne Tillman, Gary Indiana, and Eric Bogosian—all the way to a brilliant coda provided by the late George Carlin.
This one-of-a-kind anthology—“a possible textbook for Outlier Lit 101” in Glenn O’Brien’s words—recreates an unforgettable era in all its hallucinatory splendor: transgressive, raucous, unruly, harrowing, and often subversively hilarious.
Glenn O’Brien, editor, is the author of Soapbox, Human Nature (dub version), and How To Be A Man. A former editor at Interview, Rolling Stone, Spin, and High Times, he writes frequently on contemporary art, supplied the lead catalog essay to the Whitney Museum exhibition “Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–65,” and is a contributing editor at Ten, L’Officiel Hommes, and GQ, where he writes the “Style Guy” column.
This special publication features full-cloth binding, acid-free paper, and a unique design with specifications differing from those of Library of America series titles.