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Writing from America's Hip Underground
Library of America
October 2013
On Sale: October 17, 2013
500 pages ISBN: 1598532561 EAN: 9781598532562 Kindle: B00FYMRAZ2 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
Who were the original hipsters? In this dazzling collection,
Glenn O’Brien provides a kaleidoscopic guided tour through
the margins and subterranean tribes of mid-twentieth century
America—the worlds of jazz, of disaffected postwar youth, of
those alienated by racial and sexual exclusion, of outlaws
and drug users creating their own dissident networks.
Whether labeled as Bop or Beat or Punk, these outsider
voices ignored or suppressed by the mainstream would merge
and recombine in unpredictable ways, and change American
culture forever. To read The Cool School is to experience the energies
of that vortex. Drawing on memoirs, poems, novels, comedy
routines, letters, essays, and song lyrics, O’Brien creates
an unparalleled literary mix tape bringing together Henry
Miller, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac, Diane di Prima, Lenny
Bruce, William S. Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Annie Ross, Norman
Mailer, Terry Southern, Andy Warhol, Lester Bangs, and
dozens of others, including such legendary figures as Beat
avatar Neal Cassady, jazz memoirist Babs Gonzales, inspired
comic improviser Lord Buckley, no-holds-barred essayist
Seymour Krim, and underground filmmaker Jack Smith. His
one-of-a-kind anthology recreates an unforgettable era in
all its hallucinatory splendor: transgressive, raucous,
unruly, harrowing, and often subversively hilarious.
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