Books on the Beats

I've long considered the best book ever written about the Beat generation to be the slim poetic 1979 masterpiece by Aram Saroyan, Genesis Angels. I still believe that.

But a recent book, The Typewriter Is Holy, is a recommended companion to the earlier book. While Saroyan's book focuses on Lew Welch and is written like a prose-poem, Bill Morgan's 2011 book is a history with an unusual slant: he defines the Beat generation in terms of the network of friendships maintained and directed by Allen Ginsberg and tells the story of the group through time, providing fascinating details ignored in other histories of the beats.

We know, for example, what Kerouac was doing when Ginsberg was elsewhere doing something else, and so on for the core group, which includes many figures usually ignored. So the new book is rich with detail and juxtapositions that enlighten the era.

Kerouac's suffering to get On the Road published, for example, writing other books before it finally came out, is communicated in a way that makes the reader feel Kerouac's pain. Morgan also is excellent at putting this literary movement in historic perspective, then and now, detailing how the core meaning of the movement got railroaded by media and publishers out to get copy and money from the new literary energy. In the end, the Beat generation involved none of the core members and turned into a trip to Disneyland, and this legacy remains with us.

These two books read together make an excellent introduction and appreciation of Ginsberg and friends.