Beat Writers at Work

From the pages of The Paris Review andedited by George Plimpton, the Writers at Work interviews, with the great figures of the Beat and Black Mountain movements Mr. Plimpton and his able cohorts at The Paris Review have cannily chosen this historical moment for the retrieval of this archive, viz., the fortieth anniversary of Kerouac's masterpiece, and also the recent departures of Ginsberg and Burroughs to celestial addresses, and thus we have a real warts-and-all retrospective, ex post facto, Kerouac in the late sixties, Ginsberg (in one of two pieces here) in the late seventies, Bowles in the eighties, Snyder in the nineties, so that the high period of Beat style is well past at the time of these conversations; Plimpton's wisdom here amounts to permitting the language and form of these interviews to persist over the years and thereby accrue historical context, in which we are enabled to see how the Beat praxis (or Black Mountain praxis) is reactive when faced with such forces as Vietnam, hippie culture, eighties consumerism, neglect by literary history, and so forth. --from the Introduction by Rick MoodyIntroduction by Rick Moody, William Burroughs (1965) Allen Ginsberg (1966), Robert Creely (1968), Jack Kerouac (1968)Charles Olson (1970), Voznesensky, Ginsberg, Orlovsky (1980)Paul Bowles (1981), Ken Kesey (1994)A Semester with Allen Ginsberg (1995), Gary Snyder (1996)Barney Rosset (1997), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1998) Read Women Writers at Work in the same series