Customer Reviews

The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960 (Circles of the Twentieth Century)

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The most unbiased and honest writing on the beats I've read to date. Steven Watson stears clear of glorification and awe, and brings you inside the little worlds of these real life characters. Swings you around to the outside looking in observing these dark lost drug induced literary masters. I especially appreciate the in depth look at Joan Vollmer Burroughs, an often overlooked main character of the Beats.

This is a great book for a numer of reasons. I'm going to list a number of them and then write a bit in conclusion.

1. It deals with many of the 'Beats' rather than focusing, as is typical, on Kerouac and Ginsberg and forgetting the rest of them. It provides an illuminating portrait of Burroughs (who is definately a key figure), Neal Cassidy (who is also), and alot of the girls, etc. who were around them. 2. It provides reading lists, etc. of what they were reading. This is HUGE if you want to understand the bitterness/despair that is found in Burroughs and Ginsberg... as well as insight into how they interpretted their life and times (i.e. because they read these books, they in a dialogic sense would interpret things along such-and-such lines.... as a psychologist would interpret a 'vision of God' one way and a believer a second.... 3. Lots of minutia/trivia that is just fun.

It's a really good book and more stimulating than one would expect from a book that is in the shape of a square. It would not suffice as a literary biography of any of the authors contained in the 'movement' nor could it supplant any social history book. But, it suppliments them and is fun to read: sort of an academic version of 'Seventeen' at points. I really love this book. I'd definately recommend this book to anyone who wants to become first among their band of friends if all their friends want to do is read a little bit of 'On the Road' and 'Howl' (and then think they know about this time period....

This is by far the best book about the Beats that I have read to date. I really enjoyed the entire book. Its a quick read, has fun anecdotes, quotes and definitions printed in the margins of every page, and delivers a tremendous amount of information about the Beat Generation. I was impressed by the amount of history covered for the main Beat characters, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carr, and Burroughs. I especially enjoyed the in depth looks at their first meetings with one another and the focus on what each one was reading during the early years. The aforementioned writers are definitely the focus of this book, but there is also a decent amount of time dedicated to minor characters involved in the generation.
You really can't go wrong with this book, rather this will be your first introduction to the Beats or your a veteran of Beat lore, you will definitely gain something from reading this text. This book also includes an awesome year to year run down of important events in the Beat movement shown in correlation with important social and political events of the time. If you enjoy this book you may want to check out 'Rolling Stone's Book of the Beats' also, another great addition to the Beat fan's bookshelf.

This was one of the better written books I've seen on the Beat Generation. This book will help out those who are new to the Beats, and those who would like some background. It isn't just about the birth, it spans the whole genration, and the aftermath.

Steven Watson does an admirable job of bringing together the various strands of Beat history through an engaging, storyteller-like style. Though he doesn't cover much new ground, his treatment of the Beat Women, Black Mountain Poets and the San Francisco Renaissance will be particularly helpful for those who are just beginning to explore the ancillary figures of the Beat movement. However, anyone already familiar with the lives of Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac will find nothing revelatory here.

One point of concern is Watson's often overzealous descriptions of Beat sexuality. While sexual liberalism was certainly a significant tenet of Beat existence, it was not, in my estimation, the raison d'etre for Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, etc. It could be argued that Neil Cassady illuminated the sexual experience for core Beats, but his contribution as an iconic figure should not be devalued by presenting him as merely the sexual driving force of the Beats. Moreover, Watons implies that Ginsberg's homosexuality was the primary facet of his literary development. This is more than debatable. Certainly, Ginsberg's supernatural visions of Blake and his relationship with his mother served a much more profound purpose.

Though Watson should be commended for his thoroughness, the result at times is an overemphasis on the sexual side of the Beats. In Watson's book, this serves to lessen the importance of the Beats' dramatic contributions to literature and poetry.

There are few literary movements in American history that have been as influential as that of the Beat Generation. Together they expressed discontent with life in postwar America and decried the literary traditions of their age. Their subjects were their very own lives, particularly their relationships, their travels, and their experimentation and use of mind-altering chemicals, all of which was in defiance of the social norms of their times.

In this book, Steven Watson chronicles the formative years of the movement, from their initial encounters in 1940s New York to the publication of Burroughs's novel "Naked Lunch." In this, Watson follows an outline of the history of the Beats once articulated by Allen Ginsberg, starting with how they came together as a group and then moving on to describe the writing of their key works, their struggles against censorship, and their eventual success and notoriety. While his focus is primarily on the major figures - Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Herbert Huncke - and their influences on one another, his scope is wide-ranging, and includes examinations of the San Francisco Renaissance, the avant-garde Black Mountain College, and the subsequent commercialization of the Beats by the end of the 1950s.

Watson describes all of this in a brisk and informative narrative. Well supplemented with illustrations, the margins are peppered with quotes, definitions of Beat terminology, and lists of people, books, and traits that define the movement. Together it makes for an invaluable guidebook to the Beats; while no substitute for the writings themselves, it is an excellent resource for understanding the origins and development of the Beat movement.

This is the raw,un-sissified, un-sanitized, non-blessed by the smooth,fat inheritors story. Real, Raw, junkies, hipsters, petty criminals, murderers, dark,dark rebels, gay-straight-inbetween, riders on the storm. They couldn't quite hide in the shadows from the man & the pop culture. Both sought them out because they were forbidden, insidious, rebellious. The one to try to jail & silence them; The other to try & make them into insipid canned anti-hero's. They were NIETHER. They were the carriers of the torch in the post war regimented victorious America; thought itself lords of all the world, ruined & bigoted by that victory. All America owes them a debt for saving the country from itself. Little Hunkie The Junkie, strutting Neil Cassidy, bizarre-brilliant William S. Burroughs, all American track star gone bad, Jack Kerouac, the single handed reviver of bardic poetry, Ginsberg; they're all there. You can't make this stuff up. These people are bigger than their legends. Buy the book & edify yourself.