Focusing on some of the most popular writers of the last 40 years, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, this new collection also examines the work of John Clellon Holmes and Herbert Huncke as well as offering a first ever consideration of black beat writers like LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka), Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman. The first introduction to Beat writers to explore the role of women and gender, through memoirists such as Carolyn Cassady and Bonnie Bremser, as well as the Beats as political activists, this study examines the key influences on the movement, such as an Indian and Buddhist philosophy, the sixties' counter-culture, the poetry of Emerson and Whitman and European trends and the Modernist tradition.