The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete Uncensored History of the Beat Generation

Bill Morgan
Free Press (SimonandSchuster.com)

“All we got to do is really love each other,” said gay “Beat Generation” poet Allen Ginsberg. Easier said than done when in the 1940s homosexuality was considered insanity, writers escaped bourgeois conformity with drugs and alcohol, and some used sex as a form of currency. It’s a wonder anything got written, but it did. The Beats weren’t saints, says the author, but there was something divine in the breezy spontaneity of what they wrote. —Review: Donalevan Maines