The Cambridge Companion to the Beats

The Cambridge Companion to the Beats offers an in-depth overview of one of the most innovative and popular literary periods in America the Beat era. The Beats were a literary and cultural phenomenon originating in New York City in the 1940s that reached worldwide significance. Although its most well-known figures are Jack Kerouac Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs the Beat movement radiates out to encompass a rich diversity of figures and texts that merit further study. Consummate innovators the Beats had a profound effect not only on the direction of American literature but also on models of socio-political critique that would become more widespread in the 1960s and beyond. Bringing together the most influential Beat scholars writing today this Companion provides a comprehensive exploration of the Beat movement asking critical questions about its associated figures and arguing for their importance to postwar American letters.