The Subterraneans

by Christopher

Posted to WritersAndGenres on 2001-07-23 13:29:00

Parent message is 26544
My first book of the Beats was Kerouac’s “The Subterraneans.” Slim book, user friendly, but outfitted with all the colors of OTR, Visions of Cody, Big Sur. A sparkling gem. Then to Ginsburg’s “Howl” and Anne Charter’s bio of Kerouac, and I don’t remember what all from there. I was 16 and this was 30 years ago. Bukowski is pure genius. Any of his short stories will serve as an intro, though they came long after the “funeral of the Beat Generation” in NY in ’61. And of course, you gotta get hip to the soundrtack of those times: Bird and Dizzy and Miles Davis and Coltrane, etc. You can’t fully appreciate the one without the other, the music flowed alongside the words like twin rivers.

The Literary Kicks message boards were active from 2001 to 2004.