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!
Gary Snyder: Collected Poems
Gary Snyder: Collected Poems
The first collected edition of an essential, Pulitzer Prize-winning Beat poet, the indispensable voice whose deep ecological vision and Buddhist spirituality grows more relevant with each passing decade
Gary Snyder is one of America’s indispensable poets, the “Thoreau of the Beat Generation” and our “laureate of Deep Ecology.” Now, for the first time, all of Snyder’s poetry is gathered in a single, authoritative Library of America volume.
Here are all of Snyder’s published books of poetry spanning a career of almost seventy years. Early collections such as Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Myths & Texts, and The Back Country reflect his hardscrabble rural upbringing in the Pacific Northwest; his life as a logger, fire-lookout, freighter crewman, carpenter, and trail-blazer; his lifelong interest in Native American oral literatures; and his pioneering studies of Zen Buddhism.
In Turtle Island and Axe Handles––the former a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and the latter the American Book Award in 1984––he explores countercultural alternatives to environmental and spiritual decline and envisioning new forms of harmony with nature.
His epic Mountains and Rivers Without End, a poem four decades in the making and regarded by many as his masterwork, is followed by Danger on Peaks, and the intimate, preternaturally candid late lyrics of This Present Moment, which meditate on his life as a father, husband, friend, neighbor, and homesteader in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada, where he has lived since 1971.
The volume concludes with a generous selection, made by Snyder himself, of previously uncollected poems from little magazines and broadsides; translations from East Asian literatures; and drafts and fragments never before published. Also included are explanatory notes, a detailed chronology of Snyder’s life, and an essay on textual selection.