Beat Writers at Work: The Paris Review

Collected here are interviews with the great Beat and Black Mountain writers from the pages of The Paris Review. In this new compendium, the writers describe their art and lives, creating a unique and fascinating record of their inspirations.Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg; On the Road, Naked Lunch, Howl: The names and titles continue to reverberate as the Beats remain a vital source of inspiration to successive generations of readers and writers. In their Writers at Work series, The Paris Review has interviewed all the key Beats and their cousins, the Black Mountain School of experimental poets. In this new collection, they describe their art and lives, creating a unique and fascinating record of the writers and their inspirations.pAllen Ginsberg interviews Andrei Voznesensky and Amiri Baraka and is interviewed himself, alongside Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Robert Creely, Ken Kesey, and Denise Levertov. Beat Writers at Work also includes a previously unpublished interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.pRick Moody, the author of Garden State, The Ice Storm, and Purple America has written a new Introduction.From the pages of The Paris Review andbredited by George Plimpton, the Writers at Work interviews, with the great figures of the Beatbrand Black Mountain movementsbr 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