The Beats

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Literature

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Film

For a mere 50 cents in 1963 you could have bought this ultra-cool paperback edited by my favorite Beat critic, Seymour Krim. Every entry has a fiery little introduction in Krim's terse verbal shorthand of hip. This book has more prose than The Beat Scene, and includes pieces by Norman Mailer and Hubert Selby Jr., who wrote Last exit to Brooklyn.

The real stroke of Krim's genius was including Norman Podhoretz's The Know-Nothing Bohemians article from The Partisan Review, a scathing critique of the entire beat movement by its self-appointed arch enemy. I really enjoyed reading this piece, because he scores more than a few good points, especially against Jack Kerouac.

Krim's own piece herein, The Insanity Bit, is a haunting description of his own fight with mental illness, is incredibly modern in its self-revelation. Modern writers have moved much further in the direction of self-revelation than was normal in the 50s, but this piece goes so much further than even the most modern writer that even a jaded reader like myself was amazed, and even more so that it was written in the middle of the most conformist time in the history of America.