TYPEWRITER IS HOLY, THE - THE COMPLETE, UNCENSORED HISTORY OF THE BEAT GENERATION

Morgan brings a productive career of chronicling the mid-twentieth-century writers known as the Beats to a fine point with this thorough popular history that eschews criticism to concentrate on who was where, doing what, when. If you weren’t a friend of Allen Ginsberg’s, you weren’t a Beat, Morgan says, which means that the first Beat, Lucien Carr, was never a writer. Carr’s good looks attracted Columbia freshman Ginsberg, not yet a self-accepting homosexual, and his affability led him to introduce Ginsberg to William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, the other essential Beats. The basic trio pulled other aspiring authors as well as artists, thieves, and con men into their ambit as, during 1944-59, all the trials, travels, and travail that eventuated in the three holy books of Beat - Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, Kerouac’s On the Road, and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch - transpired, Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder became second-tier Beats (Snyder proved crucial because, while never involved in the others’ sexual and pharmaceutical adventures, he set the example for Ginsberg’s very influential later turns toward Buddhism and ecology), and Kerouac separated himself via the bottle. Kerouac’s 1969 death is often considered the end of the Beat generation, though his opinion was that that happened in 1949. Though by no means stylishly written, this must be regarded as the just-the-facts-ma’am basic text on the most important literary phenomenon of post-WWII America.