ENG 368: Literature and Culture of New York: Home

In honest, lucid fictional prose designed to capture the events, emotions, and essence of his experience among the Beats, Holmes describes an individualistic post World War II New York where crime is celebrated, writing is revered, and parties, booze, discussions, drugs, and sex punctuate life.

In January 1953, William S. Burroughs began an expedition into the jungles of South America to find yage, the fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. From the notebooks he kept and the letters he wrote home to Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs composed a narrative of his adventures that later appeared as The Yage Letters.

Here are his autobiographical writings, the rambling American saga of a truly free individual.

Kerouac's most important poem, Mexico City Blues, incorporates all the elements of his theory of spontaneous composition. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are all lyrically combined in the loose format of the blues to create an original and moving epic.

Riprap, his first book of poems, was published in Japan in 1959 by Origin Press, and it is the 50th anniversary of that groundbreaking book that is celebrated with this new edition.

Corso, Long Live Man. Poetry that jubilates over being a "(hu-)man, Alive, here in the moment."

With a new preface as well as a final chapter on William S. Burroughs's last years, the acclaimed Literary Outlaw is the only existing full biography of an extraordinary figure.

Shift Linguals traces a history of the cut-up method, the experimental writing practice discovered by Brion Gysin and made famous by Beat author William S. Burroughs.

This collection of essays by leading scholars offers an interdisciplinary consideration of Burroughs's art. It links his lived experience to his many major prose works written from 1953 on, as well his sound, cinema and media projects. Moving beyond the merely literary, the contributors argue for the continuing social and political relevance of Burroughs's work for the emerging global order.

In January 1953, William S. Burroughs began an expedition into the jungles of South America to find yage, the fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. From the notebooks he kept and the letters he wrote home to Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs composed a narrative of his adventures that later appeared as The Yage Letters.

The Portable Beat Reader collects the most significant writing of these and fellow members (and spiritual descendants) of the Beat Generation, including Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Bob Dylan, Leroi Jones, and Michael McClure. In poetry, fiction, essays, song lyrics, letters, and memoirs, it captures the triumphant rudeness, energy, and exhilaration of a movement that swept through American letters with hurricane force.

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.

These two ambitious writers, Holmes and Kerouac, shared days and nights arguing over what writing should be, wandering from one explosive party to the next, and hanging on the new sounds of bebop. Through the pages of Holmes's journals, often written the morning after the events they recount, Charters discovered and mined an unparalleled trove describing the seminal figures of the Beat Generation: Holmes, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and their friends and lovers.

Beginning in New York in 1944, James Campbell finds the leading members of what was to become the Beat Generation in the shadows of madness and criminality. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs had each seen the insides of a mental hospital and a prison by the age of thirty.

A handbook for conscious personal and planetary change that will transform the current world crisis into planetary shift toward the mind of God. Outlines the issue plaguing the world and moving it toward breakdown. Replaces the limited consciousness of our failing society with the quantum consciousness that is rooted in the new science field. Provides a specific process to shift consciousness, The Future of the Future.

InThe Beats: A Graphic History, those who were mad to live have come back to life through artwork as vibrant as the Beat movement itself. Told by the comic legend Harvey Pekar, his frequent artistic collaborator Ed Piskor, and a range of artists and writers, including the feminist comic creator Trina Robbins and the Mad magazine artist Peter Kuper,The Beats takes us on a wild tour of a generation that, in the face of mainstream American conformity and conservatism, became known for its determined uprootedness, aggressive addictions, and startling creativity and experimentation.

Author Tim Hunt explores Kerouac's creative process and puts his work in conversation with classic American literature and with critical theory.

This one-volume omnibus, planned by the author before his death and now completed by his biographer, Ann Charters, makes clear the ambition and accomplishment of Jack Kerouac's " Legend of Duluoz " - the story of his life told in the course of his many "true-story novels," including On the Road.

Kerouac's view of the promise of America, the seductive and lovely vision of the beckoning open spaces of our continent, has never been expressed better by subsequent writers, perhaps because Kerouac was our last writer to believe in America's promise--and essential innocence--as the legacy he would explore in his autobiographical fiction.

Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road, followed by Visions of Cody.

Allen Ginsberg recounts the road trips, love affairs, and search for personal liberation that led to the most timeless, electrifying, and controversial work of his career. Pushing the limits and challenging the mainstream, the passionate and provocative Howl and its publisher find themselves on trial for obscenity, with prosecutor Ralph McIntosh setting out to have the book banned, while defense attorney Jake Ehrlich fervently argues for freedom of speech and creative expression.

Traveling cross-country, young writer Sal Paradise has his life shaken by the arrival of free-spirited Dean Moriarty and his girl, Marylou. As they travel across the country, they encounter a mix of people who each impact their journey indelibly

This program features readings and comments by the late Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg analyzes the poetry of Blake, then reads from his own poems, "Do the Meditation Rock" and "Skeleton. Other poets include Vietnamese-born Le Thi Diem Thuy, Robert Hass, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Komunyakaa, Li-Young Lee, Louis Jenkins, and Hass discuss poetic interpretations of personal and political history, and provide examples through readings from their poems.

This first full critical and historical study of Howl brilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Drawing from newly released psychiatric reports on Ginsberg, from interviews with his psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks, and from the poet's journals, American Scream shows how Howl brought Ginsberg and the world out of the closet of a repressive society.

A long overdue comprehensive bibliography on the avant-garde poet and popular culture icon, covering the years 1941 to 1994, prepared with the cooperation of Ginzberg himself.

Drawing from numerous sources, this collection is both a riveting life in letters and an intimate guide to understanding an entire creative generation.

Allen Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems was originally published by City Lights Books in the fall of 1956. Subsequently seized by U.S. Customs and the San Francisco police, it was the subject of a long court trial at which a series of poets and professors persuaded the court that the book was not obscene.

This version, capturing a moment in creative history, represents the first full expression of Kerouac's revolutionary aesthetic.