ISBN (none listed)

"What does it mean to be 'Beat'? What effect have the 'Beats' had on the American Way of Life? What are their beliefs regarding sex, jazz, the use of drugs? Is the 'Beat Generation' a passing fad or a deep-seated revolt? These and many other questions are answered in this book, which uses conversations, personal interviews, and tape recordings to delve beneath the surface and show the real world of the 'Beats'." [jacket blurb, US pbk, 1962]

"When the barbarians appear on the frontiers of a civilization it is a sign of a crisis in that civilization. If the barbarians come, not with weapons of war but with the songs and ikons of peace, it is a sign that the crisis is one of a spiritual nature. In either case the crisis is never welcomed by the entrenched beneficiaries of the status quo. In the case of the holy barbarians it is not an enemy invasion threatening the gates, it is 'a change felt in the rhythm of events' that signals one of those 'cyclic turns' which the poet Robinson Jeffers has written about.

"To the ancient Greeks the barbarian was the bearded foreigner who spoke an unintelligible gibberish. Our barbarians come bearded and sandaled, and they speak and write in a language that is not the 'Geneva language' of conventional usage. That their advent is not just another bohemianism is evident from the fact that their ranks are not confined to the young. Moreover, the not-so-young among the holy barbarians are not 'settling down', as the nonconformists of the past have done. Some of them are already bringing up families and they are still 'beat'. This is not, as it was at the turn of the century, the expatriates in flight from New England gentility and bluenose censorship. It is not the anti-Babbitt caper of the twenties. Nor the politically oriented alienation of the thirties. The present generation has taken note of all these and passed on beyond them to a total rejection of the whole society, and that, in present-day America, means the business civilization. The alienation of the hipsters from the squares is now complete.

"Presenting the picture in this way, as a kind of evolutionary, historical process, I must caution the reader at this point that it is merely a preliminary formulation of the picture, a simplification. When I met Kenneth Rexroth for the first time in Chicago back in the late twenties he was as beat as any of today's beat generation. So was I. So were most of my friends at the time. If some of us remained beat through the years and on into the fifties it was because we felt that it was not we but the times that were out of joint. We have had to wait for the world to catch up with us, to reach a turn, a crisis. What that crisis is and why the present generation is reacting to it the way it does is the theme of this book.

"I have chosen Venice, California, as the scene, the laboratory as it were, because I live here and have seen it grow up around me. Newer than the North Beach, San Francisco scene, or the Greenwich Village scene, it has afforded me an opportunity to watch the formation of a community of disaffiliates from its inception. Seeing it take form I had a feeling of 'this is where I came in', that I had seen it all happening before. But studying it closely, from the inside, and with a sympathy born of a kindred experience, I have come to the conclusion that this is not just another alienation. It is a deep-going change, a revolution under the ribs. These people are picking up where we -- left off? -- no, where we began. Began and lived it and wrote about it and waited for the world to catch up with us. I am telling their story here because it is our story, too. My story." --Lawrence Lipton (the Preface to the book, written in Venice West, 9 February 1959).