Kerouac and Friends: A Beat Generation Album

Renowned photographer Fred McDarrah captures the Beats in the midst of their rise to acclaim. His 100 shots of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others partying in cheap downtown Manhattan apartments, socializing at Grove Press book parties, and hunching over their typewriters are joined by writings from a diverse and illuminating raft of sources. Jack Kerouac contributes a list of activities necessary for writing success ("1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy"), Diana Trilling shares her thoughts on her fears of and for husband's former student, Allen Ginsberg, and Mad magazine sends up the young men and women who took up the beat lifestyle Kerouac and friends made famous. Kerouac and Friends is a fresh and surprising look at the young men and women who would come to define the last major epoch in American literature. "A lot of great stuff here about those Abominable Snowmen of modern poetry, the Beats."—Lawrence Ferlinghetti "Not merely a marvelous nostalgia trip. It also illuminates an important period in American culture. First rate!"—Michael Harrington

Renowned photographer Fred McDarrah captures the Beats in the midst of their rise to acclaim. His 100 shots of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others partying in cheap downtown Manhattan apartments, socializing at Grove Press book parties, and hunching over their typewriters are joined by writings from a diverse and illuminating raft of sources. Jack Kerouac contributes a list of activities necessary for writing success (“1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy”), Diana Trilling shares her thoughts on her fears of and for husband’s former student, Allen Ginsberg, and Mad magazine sends up the young men and women who took up the beat lifestyle Kerouac and friends made famous. Kerouac and Friends is a fresh and surprising look at the young men and women who would come to define the last major epoch in American literature. “A lot of great stuff here about those Abominable Snowmen of modern poetry, the Beats.”—Lawrence Ferlinghetti “Not merely a marvelous nostalgia trip. It also illuminates an important period in American culture. First rate!”—Michael Harrington

Publishers Weekly

Originally published in 1985 by Fred McDarrah (Beat Generation), picture editor of the Village Voice for more than 40 years, this book takes a refreshingly direct documentarian gaze at an overdocumented and mythologized set of writers and artists. Fred McDarrah was there when the group centered on Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs was first working out its thing, and assiduously documented the process, which included scores of people seen here but less frequently mentioned in connection with the movement: Ted Joans, John Clellon Holmes, Thomas McGrath, Mimi Margeaux, artist Fielding Dawson, Seymour Krim and many others. Completely reset and reformatted with fils Timothy (a Las Vegas Sun columnist), the book is organized around 30 journalistic pieces and essays contemporary to the movement, including Norman Podhoretz's "Youth Disaffiliated from a Phony World," several pieces by Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Buddhists Find a Beatnik `Spy'," and Gilbert Millstein's "Youth Will Serve Itself." But the stars of the show are the 260 candid b&w photos, showing the men (and it is mostly men) going about their literary business unassumingly. (Jan.)