Covering mainly the years between 19, Ginsberg's critical technique is to offer a catalogue of breakthroughs, epiphanies, and favorite passages or "big sentences," interspersed with gossipy anecdotes and revelatory asides. Citing their influences in everything from jazz to Dostoyevsky, Ginsberg depicts the beats not as criminals, addicts, or delinquents but as restless, beatific seekers after spiritual truth. Ginsberg discusses William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, and himself, but Jack Kerouac is the soul of the book, portrayed throughout with admiration and affection, if not always reverence. For Beat aficionados and neophytes alike, The Best Minds of My Generation is a personal yet critical look at one of the most important literary movements of the twentieth century.īeat biographer Morgan's (The Beats Abroad) transcript of Ginsberg's university lectures, given first at Naropa Institute in 1977 and later at Brooklyn College, are a gold mine for anyone interested in beat literature. In The Best Minds of My Generation, Ginsberg shares anecdotes of meeting Kerouac, Burroughs, and other writers for the first time, explains his own poetics, elucidates the importance of music to Beat writing, discusses visual influences and the cut-up method, and paints a portrait of a group who were leading a literary revolution. Ginsberg was seminal to the creation of a public perception of Beat writers and knew all of the major figures personally, making him uniquely qualified to be the historian of the movement. Compiled and edited by renowned Beat scholar Bill Morgan, and with an introduction by Anne Waldman, The Best Minds of My Generation presents the lectures in edited form, complete with notes, and paints a portrait of the Beats as Ginsberg knew them: friends, confidantes, literary mentors, and fellow revolutionaries. Through the creation of this course, which he ended up teaching five times, first at the Naropa Institute and later at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg saw an opportunity to present the history of Beat Literature in his own inimitable way.
In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem “Howl,” and Jack Kerouac’s seminal book On the Road, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation.
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