The Typewriter Is Holy - Paperback

by Bill Morgan (Author)

Anyone who cares to understand the cultural ferment of America in the later twentieth century must know of the writings and lives of those scruffy bohemians known as the Beats.

In this highly entertaining work, Bill Morgan, the country's leading authority on the movement and a man who personally knew most of the Beat writers, narrates their history, tracing their origins in the 1940s to their influence on the social upheaval of the 1960s.

The Beats, through their words and nonconformist lives, challenged staid postwar America. They believed in free expression, dabbled in free love, and condemned the increasing influence of military and corporate culture in our national life. But the Beats were not saints. They did too many drugs and consumed too much booze. The fervent belief in spontaneity that characterized their lives and writings destroyed some friendships.

As we watch their peripatetic lives and sexual misadventures, we are reminded above all that while their personal lives may not have been holy, their typewriters and their lasting words very much were.

Author Biography

Bill Morgan is a painter and archival consultant working in New York City. He is the author of numerous books about Beat Generation history and its writers, most recently The Beats Abroad: A Global Guide to the Beat Generation, Peter Orlovsky: A Life in Words, and The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation. He has edited collections of writing and correspondence of many of the Beat Generation's most important authors, including Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Burroughs, Snyder and Corso. He is a painter and a Civil War expert, and has worked as an archivist for Lawrence Ferlinghtetti, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Diane diPrima, Oliver Sacks, Arthur Miller and Timothy Leary among others.