In this highly entertaining work, Bill Morgan,a leading authority on the movement and a man who personally knew most of the Beats, narrates the history of these writers as primarily a social group of friends, tracing their origins together during the World War II years to the full blossoming of their notoriety in the late 1950s to their profound influence on the social upheaval of the 1960s. Indeed, it is impossible to comprehend the sixties without first grasping the importance of the social ripples set in motion by the Beats a decade earlier. This is a sweeping, indispensable story about the discontented free spirits of the Beat Movement. We watch their peripatetic lives, their sexual misadventures, their ambivalent response to fame. We are reminded above all that while their personal lives may have not have been holy, their typewriters and their lasting words very much were.

Bill Morgan is the author and editor of more than a dozen books about the Beat writers, including the acclaimed biography, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. For nearly forty years he has worked as an editor and archival consultant for nearly every member of the Beat Generation including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Diane Di Prima, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Edie Kerouac. He lives in Vermont.