BEATSPOLITATION

Today we would call the sensationalizing of the cultural phenomenon known as the beat generation to sell books and movies, Beatsploitation. What you won’t be reading in this volume are lost or overlooked classics of Beat Lit. Don’t expect to find books the caliber of On the Road, Go, Junky or Last Exit to Brooklyn. The books herein were written to cash in on the beat movement…

Although the writers of these books never achieved any literary grandeur, it shouldn’t be inferred that they didn’t have beatnik cred. Indeed, all three of the authors lived in that milieu-Coons and Golightly in Greenwich Village and Geis in Venice, California. These books don’t have any literary pretension of defining what the beat movement was, but rather they reflect the places and period in which beatniks were prevalent.

This fact doesn’t make these books any less worth the attention of the student of the beat generation. Indeed more can be learned about the reaction of the public to the beatniks than by reading the entire oeuvre of authors such as Kerouac or Ginsberg…

-from How JFK Killed the Beatniks by Jeff Vorzimmer