Three Best Books to Understand the Beat Generation

Chances are if you've lived in the 20th or 21st centuries the names William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, or Allen Ginsburg have been mentioned in your company. And rather you've read them or not, their defining works have probably tickled your tympanic membranes- Naked Lunch, On the Road, or Howl. To be a casual fan of the Beats, as they are lovingly called, requires a little extra reading. These guys wrote in the grandest style of the roman a'clef and left clues to the real writers littered throughout their works. To understand the Beat Generation or to find where the Beatnik came from, these three books are the best way to get from square fan, to hip Beatster.

And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks -- Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs

Hippos was recently published and follows the Beats through their early periods in New York. The entire cast of characters are represented in the book, and to decide who is whom requires a little bit of scholarly work on the readers part. James Grauerholz has a great afterword, which will explain some of the mystery of the characters. Hippos, though, surrounds the story of the night young Lucien Carr, Caleb Carr's father, stabs a relentless gay stalker. The book paints the benzedrine and alcohol-laced nights that characterized post-World War II Manhattan. It also sets the stage to define how the Beats, in fact, became the greatest group of writers of the mid-twentieth century.

Junky -- William S. Burroughs

While Carr is running from and stabbing gay lovers in Hippos, William S. Burroughs is getting hooked on morphine and heroin and any other cocktail of illicit drugs that will help him find his fix. Junky is the first book Burroughs writes to escape the demons that led him to kill his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, in a dingy Mexican hotel in a fated game of William Tell. Junky explains the pre-philosophy measures of control Burroughs explores in his quintessential nightmare text, Naked Lunch. Junky is where we first see Burroughs mining the "routines" which will characterize Naked Lunch. We begin to see the man who was sexually-tormented as a child and struggling with his American aristocracy upbringing. This is Burroughs first steps to writing himself out of the depths of sorrow which chased him for the rest of his life after shooting Vollmer.

Go -- John Clellon Holmes

Underestimated and overlooked, Go is arguably a better example of the pre-Beats of Manhattan on the nights leading up to Carr's killing of his stalker. All the characters, as in Hippos and Junky, are in the text. What we see in Holmes's version of the eves of Cassidy's and Kerouac's jaunts across the American frontier, which will inspire the seminally Beat defining On the Road, is the energy, craftiness, and confidence of the great Beat triumvirate of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsburg. But Go also highlights how the three surrounded themselves with bright, but not so up-standing characters, like Herbert Huncke and Gregory Corso. If you're not going to read the biographies and autobiographies of the Beats, Go is the best place to start.