Beat Writers at Work: The Paris Review (Modern Library (Paperback))

From the pages of The Paris Review a collection of interviews with Jack Kerouac Allen Ginsberg William Burroughs Ken Kesey Lawrence Ferlinghetti and more   Edited by Paris Review co-founder George Plimpton and with an introduction by Rick Moody this anthology of “Writers at Work” interviews featuring the great figures of the Beat and Black Mountain movements is an in-depth look into one of the most famous literary tribes of the century. The Beats with their mix of talent bravado and insight into the social and political climes of their time continue to influence students writers and critics today.   “Mr. Plimpton and his able cohorts at The Paris Review have cannily chosen this historical moment for the retrieval of this archive viz. the fortieth anniversary of Kerouac’s masterpiece and also the recent departures of Ginsberg and Burroughs to celestial addresses and thus we have a real warts-and-all retrospective ex post facto Kerouac in the late sixties Ginsberg (in one of two pieces here) in the late seventies Bowles in the eighties Snyder in the nineties so that the high period of Beat style is well past at the time of these conversations; Plimpton’s wisdom here amounts to permitting the language and form of these interviews to persist over the years and thereby accrue historical context in which we are enabled to see how the Beat praxis (or Black Mountain praxis) is reactive when faced with such forces as Vietnam hippie culture eighties consumerism neglect by literary history and so forth.”—from the introduction by Rick Moody