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The Beat Generation: The Tumultuous '50s Movement and Its Impact on Today
by
Twenty years after its original publication and one hundred thousand copies later comes a reissued edition of the most comprehensive examination of the Beat movement--featuring a new preface and afterword by the author. Cook objectively analyzes this countercultural movement and its influences today.
Paperback, 254 pages
Published
December 31st 1994
by Quill
(first published 1971)
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Start your review of The Beat Generation: The Tumultuous '50s Movement and Its Impact on Today

A great blend of literary analysis and journalistic investigation that manages to capture the importance of these writers, artists, and friends to their own generation and those who came after them. Cook interviews several of these writers himself, including Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, and offers his insights not only on these figures as individuals but on their involvement and impact on the counterculture of the 50's, 60's, and 70's. What's especially fascinating is that when Cook first pub
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Bruce Cook, al igual que muchos de los jóvenes estadounidenses que regresaron a casa después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, fue testigo de la aparición y asenso de la generación beat.
La obra de Cook analiza y presenta cómo este movimiento no fue la alocada ola de inconformidad atacada por la crítica, y que incluso su aparición era necesaria en la cultura de los Estados Unidos. En momentos hay entrevistas y conversaciones que valen mucho la pena, como con un Ginsberg a favor de la legalización de ...more
La obra de Cook analiza y presenta cómo este movimiento no fue la alocada ola de inconformidad atacada por la crítica, y que incluso su aparición era necesaria en la cultura de los Estados Unidos. En momentos hay entrevistas y conversaciones que valen mucho la pena, como con un Ginsberg a favor de la legalización de ...more

“Beat, in the sense of beaten, frustrated, played out...”
The reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, “Howl”, “Go”, Neal, and “On the Road” - the Beat Generation! It's all in here, including interviews with some of the main players. Not a lot of new information for me, but a good overview. It reads more like a college text than anything else, and at times, I felt it was a bit dry. But it does contain some gems like:
“And if Allen Ginsberg was the Beat Generation’s Walt Whitman, then Gary Snyd ...more
The reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, “Howl”, “Go”, Neal, and “On the Road” - the Beat Generation! It's all in here, including interviews with some of the main players. Not a lot of new information for me, but a good overview. It reads more like a college text than anything else, and at times, I felt it was a bit dry. But it does contain some gems like:
“And if Allen Ginsberg was the Beat Generation’s Walt Whitman, then Gary Snyd ...more

Part research, part general interest. I picked this up at a used bookstore in Nashville. Loved this deep dive into the Beats from a late 60s/early 70s perspective--without 50 years for further analysis in between. I also dig that Cook (who died in 2003) was able to talk with the writers themselves before many of them left us. I also appreciated his real talk about Woodstock beneath the myth that it became as he made his final connections between the Beats and the Hippies. Good stuff!
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Bruce Alexander Cook was an American journalist and author who also wrote under the pseudonym Bruce Alexander. He wrote historical fiction and nonfiction.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Cook's first book was a nonfiction work, The Beat Generation, published in 1971. His first novel was Chicago-based Sex Life, in 1978.
He wrote four novels feat ...more
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Cook's first book was a nonfiction work, The Beat Generation, published in 1971. His first novel was Chicago-based Sex Life, in 1978.
He wrote four novels feat ...more
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