Download or read book The Beats in Mexico written by David Stephen Calonne and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mexico features prominently in the literature and personal legends of the Beat writers, from its depiction as an extension of the American frontier in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to its role as a refuge for writers with criminal pasts like William S. Burroughs. Yet the story of Beat literature and Mexico takes us beyond the movement’s superstars to consider the important roles played by lesser-known female Beat writers. The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its culture in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti. It also devotes individual chapters to women such as Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger, who each made Mexico a central setting of their work and interrogated the misogyny they encountered in both American and Mexican culture. The Beats in Mexico not only considers individual Beat writers, but also places them within a larger history of countercultural figures, from D.H. Lawrence to Antonin Artaud to Jim Morrison, who mythologized Mexico as the land of the Aztecs and Maya, where shamanism and psychotropic drugs could take you on a trip far beyond the limits of the American imagination.
Download or read book The Stray Bullet written by Jorge García-Robles and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William S. Burroughs arrived in Mexico City in 1949, having slipped out of New Orleans while awaiting trial on drug and weapons charges that would almost certainly have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence. Still uncertain about being a writer, he had left behind a series of failed business ventures—including a scheme to grow marijuana in Texas and sell it in New York—and an already long history of drug use and arrests. He would remain in Mexico for three years, a period that culminated in the defining incident of his life: Burroughs shot his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, while playing William Tell with a loaded pistol. (He would be tried and convicted of murder in absentia after fleeing Mexico.) First published in 1995 in Mexico, where it received the Malcolm Lowry literary essay award, The Stray Bullet is an imaginative and riveting account of Burroughs’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory attitudes toward the country and its culture. Mexico, Jorge García-Robles makes clear, was the place in which Burroughs embarked on his “fatal vocation as a writer.” Through meticulous research and interviews with those who knew Burroughs and his circle in Mexico City, García-Robles brilliantly portrays a time in Burroughs’s life that has been overshadowed by the tragedy of Joan Vollmer’s death. He re-creates the bohemian Roma neighborhood where Burroughs resided with Joan and their children, the streets of postwar Mexico City that Burroughs explored, and such infamous figures as Lola la Chata, queen of the city’s drug trade. This compelling book also offers a contribution by Burroughs himself—an evocative sketch of his shady Mexican attorney, Bernabé Jurado.
Download or read book Mexico City Blues written by Jack Kerouac and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the renowned Beat writer’s most formally inventive books, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac’s essential work of lyric verse, now reissued following his centenary celebration Written between 1954 and 1957, and published originally by Grove Press in 1959, Mexico City Blues is Kerouac’s most important verse work. It incorporates all the elements of his theory of spontaneous composition and his interest in Buddhism. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are lyrically combined in the loose format inspired by jazz and the blues. Written while Kerouac was living in Mexico City, and with references to William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Bill Garver, this exciting book in Kerouac’s oeuvre is an original and moving epic of sound, rhythm, and religion.
Download or read book Reconstructing the Beats written by J. Skerl and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-03-03 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of scholarly essays reassesses the Beat Generation writers in mid-century American history and literature, as well as their broad cultural impact since the 60s from contemporary critical, theoretical, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives. The traditional canon of major writers in this generation is expanded to include women and African Americans. The essays offer critiques of media stereotypes and popular cliches that influence both academic and popular discourse about the Beats, connect the literature of the Beat movement to music, painting, and film, and ultimately open new directions for study of the Beats in the 21st century.
Download or read book The Beats written by Larry Fink and published by powerHouse Books. This book was released on 2014 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 50s after an unsuccessful stint in college, Larry Fink dropped out and began an odyssey of hitchhiking through America. Striking out that great Beat mecca, New York City, Fink settled down on Minetta Lane with a chap who fancied himself a poet. Larry was quick to hit McDougal Street where he met Turk, Mary, Bobbie, Motha, Ambrose, Randy and Mike Stanley, and not to mention Hugh Romney (aka Wavy Gravy) and LeRoi Jones and so many more - they soon left New York to cross America for Mexico - in search of the freedoms of the road.
Download or read book The Beats written by Harvey Pekar and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-04-13 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Details the history of the Beat movement, which began in the 1940s, and describes the lives of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs; along with other writers, artists, and events in a graphic novel format.
Download or read book The Beats A Very Short Introduction written by David Sterritt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the writers of the Beat Generation revolutionized American literature with their iconoclastic approach to language and their angry assault on the conformity and conservatism of postwar society. They and their followers took aim at the hypocrisy and taboos of their time--particularly those involving sex, race, and class--in such provocative works as Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956), and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959). In this Very Short Introduction, David Sterritt offers a concise overview of the social, cultural, and aesthetic sensibilities of the Beats, bringing out the similarities that connected them and also the many differences that made them a loosely knit collective rather than an organized movement. Figures in the saga include Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Clellon Holmes, Carolyn Cassady, and Gary Snyder. As Sterritt ranges from Greenwich Village and San Francisco to Mexico, western Europe, and North Africa, he sheds much light on how the Beats approached literature, drugs, sexuality, art, music, and religion. Members of the Beat Generation hoped that their radical rejection of materialism, consumerism, and regimentation would inspire others to purify their lives and souls as well. Yet they urged the remaking of consciousness on a profoundly inward-looking basis, cultivating "the unspeakable visions of the individual," in Kerouac's phrase. The idea was to revolutionize society by revolutionizing thought, not the other way around. This book explains how the Beats used their antiauthoritarian visions and radical styles to challenge dominant values, fending off absorption into mainstream culture while preparing ground for the larger, more explosive social upheavals of the 1960s. More than half a century later, the Beats' impact can still be felt in literature, cinema, music, theater, and the visual arts. This compact introduction explains why. About the Series: Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.
Download or read book The Beats Black Mountain and New Modes in American Poetry written by Matt Theado and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes of American Poetry explores correspondences amongst the Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers, two of most well-known and influential groups of poets in the 1950s. The division of writers as Beat or Black Mountain has hindered our understanding of the ways that these poets developed from mutual influences, benefitted from direct relations, and overlapped their boundaries. This collection of academic essays refines and adds context to Beat Studies and Black Mountain Studies by investigating the groups’ intersections and undercurrents. One goal of the book is to deconstruct the Beat and Black Mountain labels in order to reveal the shifting and fluid relationships among the individual poets who developed a revolutionary poetics in the 1950s and beyond. Taken together, these essays clarify the radical experimentation with poetics undertaken by these poets.
Download or read book Desolate Angel written by Dennis McNally and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A blockbuster of a biography . . . absolutely magnificent."--San Francisco Chronicle Jack Kerouac--"King of the Beats," unwitting catalyst for the '60s counterculture, groundbreaking author--was a complex and compelling man: a star athlete with a literary bent; a spontaneous writer vilified by the New Critics but adored by a large, youthful readership; a devout Catholic but aspiring Buddhist; a lover of freedom plagued by crippling alcoholism. Desolate Angel follows Kerouac from his childhood in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, to his early years at Columbia where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, beginning a four-way friendship that would become a sociointellectual legend. In rich detail and with sensitivity, Dennis McNally recounts Kerouac's frenetic cross-country journeys, his experiments with drugs and sexuality, his travels to Mexico and Tangier, the sudden fame that followed the publication of On the Road, the years of literary triumph, and the final near-decade of frustration and depression. Desolate Angel is a harrowing, compassionate portrait of a man and an artist set in an extraordinary social context. The metamorphosis of America from the Great Depression to the Kennedy administration is not merely the backdrop for Kerouac's life but is revealed to be an essential element of his art . . . for Kerouac was above all a witness to his exceptional times.
Download or read book Off the Road written by Carolyn Cassady and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2008-10-15 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Beats written by Steven Belletto and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-13 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion offers an in-depth overview of the Beat era, one of the most popular literary periods in America.
Download or read book The Philosophy of the Beats written by Sharin N. Elkholy and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phrase "beat generation" -- introduced by Jack Kerouac in 1948 -- characterized the underground, nonconformist youths who gathered in New York City at that time. Together, these writers, artists, and activists created an inimitably American cultural phenomenon that would have a global influence. In their constant search for meaning, the Beats struggled with anxiety, alienation, and their role as the pioneers of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The Philosophy of the Beats explores the enduring literary, cultural, and philosophical contributions of the Beats in a variety of contexts. Editor Sharin N. Elkholy has gathered leading scholars in Beat studies and philosophy to analyze the cultural, literary, and biographical aspects of the movement, including the drug experience in the works of Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, feminism and the Beat heroine in Diane Di Prima's writings, Gary Snyder's environmental ethics, and the issue of self in Bob Kaufman's poetry. The Philosophy of the Beats provides a thorough and compelling analysis of the philosophical underpinnings that defined the beat generation and their unique place in modern American culture.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature written by A. Robert Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-16 with total page 783 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beat literature? Have not the great canonical names long grown familiar? Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs. Likewise the frontline texts, still controversial in some quarters, assume their place in modern American literary history. On the Road serves as Homeric journey epic. "Howl" amounts to Beat anthem, confessional outcry against materialism and war. Naked Lunch, with its dark satiric laughter, envisions a dystopian world of power and word virus. But if these are all essentially America-centered, Beat has also had quite other literary exhalations and which invite far more than mere reception study. These are voices from across the Americas of Canada and Mexico, the Anglophone world of England, Scotland or Australia, the Europe of France or Italy and from the Mediterranean of Greece and the Maghreb, and from Scandinavia and Russia, together with the Asia of Japan and China. This anthology of essays maps relevant other kinds of Beat voice, names, texts. The scope is hemispheric, Atlantic and Pacific, West and East. It gives recognition to the Beat inscribed in languages other than English and reflective of different cultural histories. Likewise the majority of contributors come from origins or affiliations beyond the US, whether in a different English or languages spanning Spanish, Danish, Turkish, Greek, or Chinese. The aim is to recognize an enlarged Beat literary map, its creative internationalism.
Download or read book This Is the Beat Generation written by James Campbell and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-11-19 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In New York in 1944, 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 30. This book charts the transformation of these experiences into literature, and a literary movement that spread across the globe. 35 photos.
Download or read book Troia written by Bonnie Bremser and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this newly rediscovered memoir, Bonnie Bremser, ex-wife of Beat-poet Ray Bremser, chronicles her life on the run from the law in the early Sixties. When Ray fled to Mexico in 1961 to avoid imprisonment for armed robbery, a crime he claimed he did not commit, Bonnie followed with their baby daughter, Rachel. In a foreign country with no money and little knowledge of the language, Bonnie was forced into a life of prostitution to support her family and their drug habit. Just twenty-three years old, Bonnie was young and inexperienced, but very much in love with her husband; indeed, she was ready to go to any lengths in an attempt to keep their small family alive and together, even if it meant becoming une troia.
Download or read book Adventures Into Mexico written by Nicholas Dagen Bloom and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving beyond the tequila-soaked clich s of Mexican tourism, this multifaceted book explores the influence and experiences of Americans in Mexico since World War II. The authors trace Mexico's growing role as an important refuge for Americans seeking not only sun and fun but also an alternative cultural and social model. And on the other side of the border, Mexican citizens and politicians have responded in creative and unexpected ways to growing numbers of migrants from their northern neighbor. Delving into the rich and varied worlds of political exiles, students, art dealers, retiree/artist colonies, and tourist zones, this work illustrates why large numbers of Americans have been irresistibly drawn to Mexico for the past sixty years. Specialists in literature, anthropology, history, and geography bring their unique perspectives to the stories of both short- and long-term migrants. Together their essays illuminate the complex goals and impact of American tourism, offering a fascinating interpretation to all those interested in modern Mexican history, border studies, tourism, and retirement in Mexico. Contributions by: Diana Anhalt, Dina M. Berger, Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Michael Chibnik, Drewey Wayne Gunn, Janet Henshall Momsen, Rebecca M. Schreiber, Rebecca Torres, David Truly, and Richard W. Wilkie
Download or read book Kerouac on Record written by Simon Warner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-03-08 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
