Keeping the Beat

Essays & Reviews on Books, Artists & Writers Who Made the US the Envy of the World

By: Jonah Raskin

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Paperback | 1 July 2026

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Paperback
230 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 1.32

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A collection of more than 40 original, groundbreaking reviews and essays about the writers of the Beat Generation, plus their contemporaries and fellow travelers. They include William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Robert Kaufman, Judy Dater, Joanna Kyger, Joanna McClure, Jan Kerouac, Tommy Orange, David Amram, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and more. The essays and reviews add up to a cultural and literary history of the US from the 1940s to the 2020s.

An analytical study of key texts by the writers of the Beat Generation, with descriptions of essential San Francisco cultural landmarks such as City Lights and the Beat Museum in North Beach, the Counterculture Museum in the Haight, and Bird & Beckett on Chenery Street, plus Black Mountain in North Carolina. Keeping the Beat traces the complex relationships between the Cold War and literature on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the bromance between Jack Kerouac and Robert Creeley, Jan Kerouac's road novel, Gaza and Mosab Abu Toha's poetry, geography and the work of Charles Plymell, Bob Fass and radio, Ted Joans and Black expression, Anne Waldman's epic verse, the San Francisco Mime Troupe and agit pop and the legacy of the English romantic poet, William Blake. The volume also includes an introduction by Simon Warner, the editor of Rock and the Beat Generation, the poem "I'm Beat, You're Beat" by author, Jonah Raskin, and his reflections on his own life and experiences in San Francisco.

Industry Reviews

"I wish I had Jonah Raskin as a teacher."

- Doris Lessing

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