The Cambridge Companion to the Beats

Steven Belletto is Associate Professor of English at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. He is author of No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012), co-editor of American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment (2012) and editor of the volume American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960 (Cambridge, forthcoming). He is also the author of numerous articles on post-1945 American literature and culture that have appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Quarterly, ELH, and Twentieth-Century Literature. From 2011 to 2016 he was Associate Editor for the journal Contemporary Literature, for which he is currently co-editor.

• Chronology; Introduction: the Beat half-century Steven Belletto; 1. Were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs a generation? William Lawlor; 2. Beatniks, hippies, yippies, feminists, and the ongoing American counterculture Jonah Raskin; 3. Locating a Beat aesthetic Regina Weinreich; 4. The Beats and literary history: myths and realities Nancy M. Grace; 5. Allen Ginsberg and Beat poetry Erik Mortenson; 6. Five ways of being Beat, circa 1958–9 Steven Belletto; 7. Jack Kerouac and the Beat novel Kurt Hemmer; 8. William S. Burroughs: Beating postmodernism Oliver Harris; 9. Memory babes: Joyce Johnson and Beat memoir Brenda Knight; 10. Beat writers and criticism Hilary Holladay; 11. Beats and gender Ronna C. Johnson; 12. Beats and sexuality Polina Mackay; 13. The Beats and race A. Robert Lee; 14. Ethnographies and networks: on Beat transnationalism Todd. F. Tietchen; 15. Buddhism and the Beats John Whalen-Bridge; 16. Beat as beatific: Gregory Corso's Christian poetics Kirby Olson; 17. Jazz and the Beat Generation Michael Hrebeniak; 18. Beats and visual culture David Sterritt; Further reading.

'This Companion locates an understanding of the Beats beyond the familiar, identifying a wide range of writers and approaches to writing which are associated with the term Beat. This factor alone makes the volume worthwhile for any reader looking to read beyond the 'canonical' Beat authors … As one would expect from a series as authoritative as the Cambridge Companions, every chapter is informed by up-to-date scholarship, written in an approachable style and is fully referenced.' Linda Kemp, Languages and Literature