The Beats

Steven Belletto is Professor of English at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. He is author of No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012), editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017) and American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960 (2017). He is also co-editor of Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War (with Joseph Keith, 2019) and American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment (with Daniel Grausam, 2012). He is currently editor for the journal Contemporary Literature.

• Part I. Get Hip, My Soul: How It All Started (1944–1948): 1. The wild outré gang of Columbia campus: the beginnings of a movement; 2. Write for them about them personally: the Beats and avant-garde literary networks at midcentury; Part II. Underground to Literary Celebrity (1948–1957): 3. Hipsters in the zoo: how the Beats came up from the underground; 4. The rise of the Beat novel: factualism to spontaneity; 5. The rise of Beat poetry: raw experience meets raw language; Part III. The Beatnik Era and the Profusion of Beat Literature (1958–1962): 6. The establishment strikes back: Beat becomes Beatnik; 7. Little magazines and subterranean networks; 8. The opening of the field; 9. Revisions of the real; 10. Ignus: from the Beat Hotel to Pull My Daisy; Part IV. Beat Politics (1962–1969): 11. The women who said something; 12. Liberating language; 13. The Vietnam effect; Coda.

'If you're thinking 'Not another book about the Beats!', then think again. Steven Belletto's literary history is surely the first to bring together the rigorous command of scholarly and critical analysis found in specialist studies with the capacious engagement found in cultural histories or essay collections. The book's double achievement is to read deeply and yet wonder broadly, keeping the writing always center stage. Grasping both how the Beats have been represented and how 'representation' was itself the subject of their literary innovations, this is at once a sophisticated self-reflexive inquiry and a highly readable vademecum for anyone with an interest in the field.' Oliver Harris, President, European Beat Studies Association