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Review essay of the four books listed above, each of which offers a revisionist account of the Beat Generation. The full details of the books are as follows: The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats. By Calonne, David Stephen. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2017. viii, 236 pp. Cloth, $105.00; e-book, $84.00. Women Writers of the Beat Era: Autobiography and Intertextuality. By Carden, Mary Paniccia. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press. 2018. xvi, 227 pp. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $29.50; e-book, $75.00. World Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature. By Fazzino, Jimmy. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. 2016. 258 pp. Paper, $40.00. Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory. By Melehy, Hassan. New York: Bloomsbury. 2016. xiii, 255 pp. Cloth, $94.50; paper, $27.96; e-book, $19.77.

On 1 March 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress on his meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Yalta, from which he had just returned. The conference was, of course, a pivotal moment in the shaping of post-War Europe and did much to establish the tense East-West relations that endured for most of the following half century. While the Cold War was indubitably a key shaper of the domestic and international environs within which the counterculture emerged and-for a short time-thrived in the United States, Roosevelt's address was significant in another way, more directly pertinent to this special issue. Since his illness (he was diagnosed with polio in 1921) and, more so, since he decided to run for president, Roosevelt had been careful to downplay the full extent of his lower-body paralysis, avoiding being seen in public using his wheelchair and developing considerable upper-body strength to keep himself upright when delivering speeches. The address to Congress was different: the President began by stating,I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say, but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs.While it would be far-fetched to suggest that Roosevelt's decision not only to sit, but also to explain why he was sitting, was the harbinger of a swift and painless revolution in the treatment and representation of disability in the United States, or to argue that it immediately tore down the barriers to full and equal participation in public life, it does serve as at the very least a symbolic start to a long, slow, and still ongoing process that has adopted a recognizably modern form since the end of the Second World War. Since then, the place of disabled people in national life has undergone many positive changes, both in terms of legislation and popular understanding; nevertheless, the Cold War culture of the 1950s also did much to codify certain forms of behaviour-most notably, homosexuality-as new kinds of "freakery," replacing the popular fascination with the display of the physically othered "freak" that had been a central tenet of American popular culture from the 1890s to the 1930s.1There were few positive, central representations of physical (or mental) disability in the American popular culture of the post-War years, and key examples that did portray disability often focused on the return to "normalcy" of men injured in the line of duty. Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950), for example, was a critically acclaimed if commercially unsuccessful representation of a paraplegic war vet (Marlon Brando), coming to terms with his new situation. Brando would become an iconic figure for two generations of the counterculture and, while The Men was hardly central to this process, his depictions of angry, "disturbed" outsiders certainly helped to create an environment in which figures straddling the boundary between "sane" and "insane" could acquire a hip presence for would-be rebels. In contrast, Ironside (1967-75), launched, ironically enough, during the Summer of Love, cast the (non-disabled) Raymond Burr as former detective Robert T. Ironside, forcibly retired after being paralysed by a sniper, before returning to the force as a special consultant and triumphing in case after case. While Ironside was very much an establishment figure, the series was significant in being aired prime-time while having a disabled central character represented positively and repeatedly triumphing over "normal" adversaries, often characterized by their own deviant criminal behaviour. At the other extreme, movies such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) did little to challenge the notion that the "mentally ill" were a danger to everyday life, even if Hitchcock's vision also targeted the hypocrisies of that life and the limitations of psychoanalysis as a means to understanding the mind. …

This essay situates Richard Brautigan within a literary genealogy reaching back to the eighteenth century. It views him as an exponent of a particular type of American writing—working in and against the traditions of Franklin, Thoreau, Hemingway, Jack London, and Ezra Pound—and as an artist insisting upon the relevance of that tradition to the present. Thus, Brautigan is no casual tourist in the American canon; instead, his work provides an updating of quintessential themes and a series of implicit and explicit references to the trans-historical resonances of texts offering imaginative resistance to hegemonic control. The essay focuses on Brautigan's very short stories "The Scarlatti Tilt" (1970) and "A Short Story about Contemporary Life in California" (1969) as exemplifications of his ability to combine formal experimentation with intertextual allusion in commentaries on (post)modern American existence. Reading his fiction, it is apparent that Brautigan detects narratives and monuments that limit human freedom everywhere he looks and that he believes escaping the control they wield requires constant vigilance and imagination. This is a process that is exemplified in the very short stories that strip almost all the layers of representational form that are normally present in fiction.

October 12. – The Discovery. – It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

Lefteris Poulios’s twenty-one line poem, “Roads” (1973), is a striking example of the global circulation of ideas in post-World War II poetry. While less overtly indebted to the Beats than his “An American Bar in Athens,” which will be the primary focus of this essay, “Roads” draws upon many of the essential Beat tropes—jazz, loneliness, travel, and the road itself—to construct an image that is simultaneously deeply nationalistic and unashamedly transnational in its location of the poetic voice. The opening line’s reference to “my land” immediately highlights this doubling (“Roads—lustrous dark octopuses of my land”), coupling a direct avowal of Greek identity with (as becomes increasingly apparent in what follows) a sense of alienation that is expressed through identification with Beat protagonists such as Sal Paradise and the “I” of “Howl.” As in On the Road, roads connect places and peoples but simultaneously remind them of an existential separation that mere travel is never able to transcend. The poem’s closing lines—“We are waiting each at our stop / We are waiting all in the zinc plated shelter”—confirm this isolation and also historicize it. The lines stand apart, separated by the only stanza break in the poem, and, in a formal feature that reinforces the impression of isolation, are written as two separate sentences, each with a full stop. Structure mirrors form, with each individual alone at his or her own “stop,” divided, possibly passive or indifferent, but certainly alienated, waiting in the shelter made of zinc. In the Greek original, Poulios uses the word υπόστeγο, a shelter to protect yourself from the elements or in which to stay, crowded or alone, until you are transported somewhere else, which in this context also appears to resonate with images of nuclear annihilation, connoting Bob Dylan’s “hard rain” and the inescapable fate that seems to await humanity, whichever road is taken.

The notion of God, ... however inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is still only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things. William James(1) In 1904, best-selling author Jack London published The Sea-Wolf,(2) and Wallace Stevens, newly admitted to the New York bar, wrote a meditative entry in his journal on the precarious instability of the middle class life to which he was accustomed. Superficially, the narratives appear to have little in common: London's novel of shipwreck and romance, shaped according to his own rules for popular fiction (and for earning a large income as a writer), seems far removed from the private meditations of a failed journalist and would-be poet, scared away from a career in writing by what he had seen (in 1901) as the "wretched, rag, tag, and bobtail" funeral of a barely mourned Stephen Crane. However, London's tale of an aesthete forced into manual labour and Stevens' journal entry on how "starting with nothing whatsoever ... is not wholly inspiring after a fellow has spent more or less time lolling about"(3) have at least one thing in common. They share what Frank Lentricchia (referring to Stevens) calls the "sense that he has been expelled from Eden, that his particular form of the American Dream involves the recapturing of a lost social and economic status that he had never earned but which he had nevertheless enjoyed, the resumption of a life that had fashioned the mode of his desire and had given him a taste of the good life."(4) Lentricchia suggests that Stevens' reflections make him the "reallife brother" of Carrie Meeber and G. W. Hurstwood in Sister Carrie, of Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, and of Jay Gatsby, with the proviso that Stevens is "different and maybe more typical" of the American experience (because of his expulsion "from Eden"), and that "neither Dreiser nor Faulkner nor Fitzgerald would tell his story." Because Stevens experienced separation from the class-comforts of his childhood and youth, but later regained these comforts with interest as vice-president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, he differs from the unidirectional (either up or down) protagonists of Dreiser, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. Indeed, the naturalism of the turn-of-the-century abounds with examples of the proletarianization of the middle classes--Vandover, Hurstwood, Lily Bart--in representations of a world where social climbing is virtually impossible for the middle class, since only a handful of the super-rich are above them, and where social descent is a constant source of fear. Only the rise and fall of Silas Lapham (and, arguably, Hank Morgan) comes to mind as a "canonical" example of the journey in reverse, though the financial experiences of both London and Mark Twain remind us that such a journey was possible. Given this, the question remains as to why London's novel should so resemble Stevens' journal entry. While it is easy to see why Stevens might fear, if not the abyss, then at least an undesirable form of downward mobility, London's own biography--as a socialist who was economically (again, in 1904) upwardly mobile--provides little motivation for his concern with Humphrey Van Weyden, the central figure in The Sea-Wolf. Given the paucity of similar characters in American literary naturalism (the protagonist may fall or rise, but is unlikely to do both), even the "purely" economic explanation that London had struck gold with his deconstruction of formula fiction, and would continue to repackage its generic traits, fails to create a cultural logic within which both Stevens' and London's texts would operate. …

In July 1920, the recently married Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald more-or-less spontaneously made the decision to drive South to visit Zelda's parents in Montgomery, Alabama, a journey of 1200 miles wh...