Beat Generation Midterm - University of Iowa - Professor Lauren Glass

roman a clef

"A novel with a key" a novel in which actual persons and events are disguised as fictional characters

David Stofsky (Go)

- Allen Ginsberg

Bill Agatson (Go)

- Bill Cannastra

Albert Ancke (Go)

- Herbert Huncke

Gene Pasternak (Go)

- Jack Kerouac

Paul Hobbes (Go)

- John Clellon Holmes

Dinah (Go)

- LuAnne Henderson

Hart Kennedy (Go)

- Neal Cassady

Will Dennison (Go)

- William S. Burroughs

The Legend of Duluoz

- one vast book - confessional picaresque - inspired by Proust - turn your life into an epic novel talked about during the discussion of On the Road

Carlo Marx (On the Road)

Allen Ginsberg

"Memoirs of a Beatnik"

Long regarded as an underground classic for its gritty and unabashedly erotic portrayal of the Beat years, Memoirs of a Beatnik is a moving account of a powerful woman artist coming of age sensually and intellectually in a movement dominated by a small confederacy of men, many of whom she lived with and loved. Filled with anecdotes about her adventures in New York City, Diane di Prima's memoir shows her learning to "raise her rebellion into art," and making her way toward literary success. Memoirs of a Beatnik offers a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumphs of the imagination.

Dean Moriarty (On the Road)

Neal Cassady

Bonnie Bremser

a little-known Beat author, and her account of a year spent in Mexico with her husband, poet Ray Bremser, and their infant daughter, Rachel. Pressured by Ray to become the family "breadwinner," Frazer became a prostitute while struggling to fulfill her obligations as mother and wife. Frazer's fictionalized autobiography, Troia: Mexican Memoirs, has the momentum, heightened consciousness, and attentiveness to detail of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, on which it was modeled, but it explores specifically female experiences.

"The Dutchman and the Slave"

Set on a New York subway train, Dutchman examines the brief, but fatal, relationship between Clay--a well-dressed, intellectual, young African American man--and Lula, an older, flirtatious, white woman. While Lula suggestively eats an apple, she flirts with Clay, becoming more and more personal as their conversation develops. Lula dominates the interaction, revealing little about herself and acknowledging that she lies frequently. She provokes Clay by challenging his middle-class self image. She seems to be aware of his insecurities and challenges Clay to pretend "that you are free of your own history." Clay's insecurities about race and social status, make him increasingly defensive. As Lula's taunts become more direct, she goads him into categorizing himself as a negative stereotype of the black male, either the oversexed stud or the cringing Uncle Tom. Finally breaking, Clay launches into a bitter soliloquy on the challenges of being black. The black music and African American culture with which Lula has been stereotyping him are, he believes, repressions of a justified rage that has kept African American people from fighting back and killing white Americans. After admitting, however, that he does not want to kill anyone, he goes to leave. But, before he can, Lula unexpectedly stabs Clay to death and orders the other passengers to throw his body off the train.

"Naked Lunch"

The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order. The reader follows the narration of junkie William Lee, who takes on various aliases, from the U.S. to Mexico, eventually to Tangier and the dreamlike Interzone. The vignettes are drawn from Burroughs' own experiences in these places and his addiction to drugs (heroin, morphine, and while in Tangier, majoun [a strong hashish confection] as well as a German opioid, brand name Eukodol, of which he wrote frequently).

"Go"

The novel that launched the beat generation's literary legacy describes the world of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neil Cassady. Published two months before Kerouac began On the Road, Go is the first and most accurate chronicle of the private lives the Beats lived before they became public figures. In lucid fictional prose designed to capture the events, emptions and essence of his experience, 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.

"Howl and Other Poems"

The prophetic poem that launched a generation when it was first published in 1956 is here presented in a commemorative fortieth Anniversary Edition. When the book arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with City Lights Bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao. The two of them were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and the case went to trial in the municipal court of Judge Clayton Horn. A parade of distinguished literary and academic witnesses persuaded the judge that the title poem was indeed not obscene and that it had "redeeming social significance." Thus was Howl & Other Poems freed to become the single most influential poetic work of the post-World War II era, with over 900,000 copies now in print.

William Burroughs

was an American writer and visual artist. Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. He was also briefly known by the pen name William Lee. Burroughs created and exhibited thousands of paintings and other visual art works, including his celebrated 'Gunshot Paintings'. Killed his wife Joan Vollmer

Diane Di Prima

Feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement. There, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, and Audre Lorde. After joining Timothy Leary's intentional community in upstate New York, she moved to San Francisco in 1968. Di Prima's poetry mixes stream-of-consciousness with attention to form and joins politics to spiritual practice. In an interview with Jacket magazine, di Prima spoke about her life as a writer, a mother, and an activist. "I wanted everything—very earnestly and totally—I wanted to have every experience I could have, I wanted everything that was possible to a person in a female body, and that meant that I wanted to be mother.... So my feeling was, 'Well'—as I had many times had the feeling—'Well, nobody's done it quite this way before but f*** it, that's what I'm doing, I'm going to risk it.'"

Elmo Hassel (On the Road)

Herbert Hunke

"Troia"

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.

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet, philosopher and writer. He is considered to be one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation during the 1950s and the counterculture that soon followed. Ginsberg is best known for his poem "Howl", in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. In 1956, "Howl" was seized by San Francisco police and US Customs. In 1957, it attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it described heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state. "Howl" reflected Ginsberg's own homosexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, adding, "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?"

Sal Paradise (On the Road)

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet of French-Canadian descent. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. He became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements

John Clellon Holmes

John Clellon Holmes was an American author, poet and professor, best known for his 1952 novel Go. Considered the first "Beat" novel, Go depicted events in his life with his friends Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. He was often referred to as the "quiet Beat" and was one of Kerouac's closest friends. Holmes was more an observer and documenter of beat characters like Ginsberg, Cassady and Kerouac than one of them.

LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka

The dramatist, novelist and poet, Amiri Baraka is one of the most respected and widely published African-American writers. With the beginning of Black Civil Rights Movements during the sixties, Baraka explored the anger of African-Americans and used his writings as a weapon against racism. Also, he advocated scientific socialism with his revolutionary inclined poems and aimed at creating aesthetic through them. Amiri Baraka's writing career spans over nearly fifty years and has mostly focused on the subjects of Black Liberation and White Racism. Today, a number of well known poems, short stories, plays and commentaries on society, music and literature are associated with his name. A few of the famous ones include, 'The Music: Reflection on Jazz and Blues', 'The Book of Monk' and 'New Music, New Poetry' among others. The literary world respects the playwright and poet, Amiri Baraka as one of the revolutionary provocateurs of African-American poetry. He is counted among the few influential political activists who have spent most of their life time fighting for the rights of African-Americans.

"On the Road"

When Jack Kerouac's On the Road first appeared in 1957, readers instantly felt the beat of a new literary rhythm. A fictionalised account of his own journeys across America with his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac's beatnik odyssey captured the soul of a generation and changed the landscape of American fiction for ever. Influenced by Jack London and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac always wanted to be a writer, but his true voice only emerged when he wrote about his own experiences in On the Road. Leaving a broken marriage behind him, Sal Paradise (Kerouac) joins Dean Moriarty (Cassady), a tearaway and former reform school boy, on a series of journeys that takes them from New York to San Francisco, then south to Mexico. Hitching rides and boarding buses, they enter a world of hobos and drifters, fruit-pickers and migrant families, small towns and wide horizons. Adrift from conventional society, they experience America in the raw: a place where living is hard, but 'life is holy and every moment is precious'. With its smoky, jazz-filled atmosphere and its restless, yearning spirit of adventure, On the Road left its mark on the culture of the late 20th century, influencing countless books, films and songs. Kerouac's prose is remarkable both for its colloquial swing and for the pure lyricism inspired by the American landscape - 'the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy'. This Folio Society edition is illustrated with evocative photographs of Kerouac and the landscapes of 1950s America. Now acknowledged as a modern classic, On the Road remains a thrilling and poignant story of the road less travelled

Old Bull Lee (On the Road)

William Burroughs