Adapting The Beat Poets

In the post-World War II era, authors of the beat generation produced some of the most enduring literature of the day. More than six decades since, work of the Beat Poets conjures images of unconventionality, defiance, and a changing consciousness that permeated the 1950s and 60s. In recent years, the key texts of Beat authors such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac have been appropriated for a new generation in feature-length films, graphic novels, and other media. In Adapting the Beat Poets: Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouc on Screen, Michael J.Prince examines how works by these authors have been translated to film. Looking primarily at three key works—Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Ginsberg’s Howl, and Kerouac’s On the Road—Prince considers how Beat literature has been significantly altered by the unintended intrusion of irony or other inflections. Prince also explores how these screen adaptations offer evidence of a growing cultural thirst for authenticity, even as mediated in postmodern works. Additional works discussed in this volume include The Subterraneans, Towers Open Fire, The Junky's Christmas,and Big Sur. By examining the screen versions of the Beat triumvirate’s creations, this volume questions the ways in which their original works serve as artistic anchors and whether these films honor the authentic intent of the authors. Adapting the Beat Poets is a valuable resource for anyone studying the beat generation, including scholars of literature, film, and American history.

Beat generation writers dismantled mainstream America. They wrote under the influence of psychedelic drugs; they crossed and navigated multicultural boundaries and questioned the American dream; and they explored homosexuality, feminism and hyper-masculinity, redefining America's marital and familial codes. Teaching such a history can be daunting, but film adaptations of Beat literature have proven to engage students. This book looks closely at the film adaptations of works by such authors as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Carolyn Cassady, Amiri Baraka and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as they relate to American history and literary studies.

He was the leading light of the Beat Generation writers and the most dynamic author of his time, but Jack Kerouac also had a lifelong passion for music, particularly the mid-century jazz of New York City, the development of which he witnessed first-hand during the 1940s with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk to the fore. The novelist, most famous for his 1957 book On the Road, admired the sounds of bebop and attempted to bring something of their original energy to his own writing, a torrent of semi-autobiographical stories he published between 1950 and his early death in 1969. Yet he was also drawn to American popular music of all kinds – from the blues to Broadway ballads – and when he came to record albums under his own name, he married his unique spoken word style with some of the most talented musicians on the scene. Kerouac's musical legacy goes well beyond the studio recordings he made himself: his influence infused generations of music makers who followed in his work – from singer-songwriters to rock bands. Some of the greatest transatlantic names – Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison and David Bowie, Janis Joplin and Tom Waits, Sonic Youth and Death Cab for Cutie, and many more – credited Kerouac's impact on their output. In Kerouac on Record, we consider how the writer brought his passion for jazz to his prose and poetry, his own record releases, the ways his legacy has been sustained by numerous more recent talents, those rock tributes that have kept his memory alive and some of the scores that have featured in Hollywood adaptations of the adventures he brought to the printed page.

From William Dickson's Rip Van Winkle films (1896) to Baz Luhrmann's big-budget production of The Great Gatsby (2013) and beyond, cinematic adaptations of American literature participate in a rich and fascinating history. Unlike previous studies of American literature and film, which emphasize particular authors like Edith Wharton and Nathaniel Hawthorne, particular texts like Moby-Dick, particular literary periods like the American Renaissance, or particular genres like the novel, this volume considers the multiple functions of filmed American literature as a cinematic genre in its own right-one that reflects the specific political and aesthetic priorities of different national and historical cinemas even as it plays a decisive role in defining American literature for a global audience.

Beat generation writers dismantled mainstream America. They wrote under the influence of psychedelic drugs; they crossed and navigated multicultural boundaries and questioned the American dream; and they explored homosexuality, feminism and hyper-masculinity, redefining America's marital and familial codes. Teaching such a history can be daunting, but film adaptations of Beat literature have proven to engage students. This book looks closely at the film adaptations of works by such authors as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Carolyn Cassady, Amiri Baraka and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as they relate to American history and literary studies.

Who was Harold Norse? Despite publishing over a dozen volumes of poetry between the early 1950s and the new millennium, until now, the Brooklyn-born Norse has been relegated to a footnote in accounts of twentieth century literary history. Harold Norse: Poet Maverick, Gay Laureate is the first collection of essays devoted to this enigmatic poet and visual artist. As this volume explores, Norse, who developed his craft while living in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s, is an important figure in the development of mid-twentieth century poetics. During the 1950s and 1960s, Norse was a notable figure in the plethora of little poetry magazines published in the USA and Europe through to skirmishes with respectability and acceptance (Penguin and City Lights). Norse is a key figure in the development of the cut-up process made famous by his friend, William S. Burroughs. His correspondence with his mentor, the poet William Carlos Williams, captures his poetic shifts from formalism to the development of his Brooklyn idiom, while his gripping autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, documents his transatlantic networks of writers and artists, among them James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski. And after returning to the US in the late 1960s, Norse emerged as leading figure in Gay Liberation poetry. List of contributors: Jan Herman, Erik Mortenson, A. Robert Lee, Fiona Paton, Daniel Kane, Steven Belletto, Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, Ronna C. Johnson, Kurt Hemmer, Chad Weidner, Benjamin J. Heal, Tate Swindell, Andrew McMillan, Douglas Field, Jay Jeff Jones, Todd Swindell, and James Grauerholz.

An intense, compelling conversation between legendary Beat icons William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, featuring photos by Ginsberg, and details of Burroughs' shamanic exorcism of the demon that led him to shoot his wife and drove his work as a writer.

In almost a century since the First World War ended, Scotland has been transformed in many rich ways. Its literature has been an essential part of that transformation. The third volume of the History, explores the vibrancy of modern Scottish literature in all its forms and languages. Giving full credit to writing in Gaelic and by the Scottish diaspora, it brings together the best contemporary critical insights from three continents. It provides an accessible and refreshing picture of both the varieties of Scottish literatures and the kaleidoscopic versions of Scotland that mark literary developments since 1918.