Beat Lives: 13 San Francisco-Based Artists of the Fifties

In Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965 (1996), Lisa Philips writes that "...much of the subject matter of acknowledged masterpieces of Beat art and poetry concerns itself with documenting the unknowns." Still, scholarship has a preoccupation with the canon of the greats - particularly the trio of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs - leaving in the shadows many so-called "minor" figures. This book contributes to the mapping of these unknowns by examining thirteen Beat artists from the Californian underground in the 1950s and 1960s. The book offers a wider understanding of Beat culture and of the lives that were lived underground.