The Burden of Legend: Beat Studies in the Twenty-First Century

This review considers five new books related to the Beat Movement. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, compiles a vast wealth of exchanges between the two Beat icons, spanning several decades of their friendship. Bill Morgan’s new history, The Typewriter is Holy, presents an extensive overview of the movement, encompassing key figures and events in an accessible narrative. Todd F. Tietchen’s book, The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana, focuses on the experiences of Beat authors in Cuba and provides an in-depth analysis of how Cuban-American interchanges influenced the political orientations of these Beat writers, claiming that Cuba’s early revolutionary era inspired radical Beat politic while later serving as a cautionary example. In Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence, Erik Mortenson argues that Beat artistic practices should be understood as a “poetics of presence” and re-periodizes Beat literature as early postmodern. For the 25th anniversary of the publication of William S. Burroughs’s Queer, Oliver Harris has edited a new, substantially changed edition of the novel. In his introduction, Harris provides his rationale guiding the changes and examines the scope of the novel’s politics.