‘A rare opportunity to view the Beat Generation...through a woman’s eyes’
The New York Times

“What do you suppose happened to all those Beatniks?” mused a blonde freshman as she drove me back to San Francisco after my reading at Berkeley last year. Well, Sweetie, some of us sold out and became hippies. And some of us managed to preserve our integrity by accepting government grants, or writing pornographic novels...Things now are more like pretty. A New Age, with a bit of the baby fat still showing.
Stay stoned Diane di Prima, May 1969

A sexy, witty Beat novel from one of the movement’s most accomplished writers. Long regarded as an underground classic for its gritty and unabashedly erotic portrayal of bohemian New York in the 1950s, Memoirs of a Beatnik is a moving account of a young artist coming of age sensually and intellectually. Written as fiction, the book grew out of di Prima’s own experience as a bold and independent woman who dropped out of college at the age of eighteen in order to write. It evokes the heady world of cafes and jazz clubs, poets and artists, out of which the Beat movement emerged, and offers a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumphs of the imagination, written by a young woman who raised her rebellion into art.

Price: £8.99
Format: Original paperback
ISBN: 0-7145-3075-1
Non Fiction
Publication date: December, 2002