Beat Generation

For "On the Road"’s author, it was a struggle to write, then a struggle to live with its fame. “My work is found, my life is lost,” he wrote.

Gerd Stern, the Beats, and the psychiatric institution.

“At the remove of time, it’s really hard to tell the difference between beat and beatsploitation.”

"On the Road" is a sad and somewhat self-consciously lyrical story about loneliness, insecurity, and failure. It’s also a story about guys who want to be with other guys.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.

In ‘The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,’ Louis Menand explores the poetry, music, painting, dance and film that emerged during the Cold War.

From Bob Dylan to David Bowie to The Beatles, the legendary Beat writer’s influence reached beyond literature into music in surprising ways.

A review of Rafael Rojas’s "Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution."

An unprepossessing townhouse in the East Village has been central to a series of distinctive events in New York City history.

In Joshua Bennett’s history of spoken word, poetry is alive and well thanks to a movement that began in living rooms and bars.

A review of "Driving With Strangers: What Hitchhiking Tells Us About Humanity."

A kinetic slice of Americana so pure you can almost smell Kerouac’s invoked apple pie – or maybe it’s the faint stench of exhaust fumes.

Subterranean metaphors have been a powerful tool of political resistance. Today, is there anywhere left to hide?