The poet Karl Shapiro, in his introduction to the 1961 American publication of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," said, "Morally I regard Miller as a holy man'Gandhi with a penis."
This was Miller's first book, and its pages were rife with full, frontal descriptions of sexual joy and despair. He ha
When, in his famous epic poem "Howl," Allen Ginsberg spoke of "the best minds of my generation," he could only have meant the Beats, that band of notorious writers and artists that formed his surrogate family. Ginsberg, the anti-establishment Buddhist homosexual, became themost widely known public pe
Andre Breton's hallucinatory approach to poetry emerged as a reaction against the tiresome literary conventions of Paris in the 1920s. Abandoning traditional notions of creativity and promoting the philosophical and political ideals of the Surrealist movement, Breton's highly stylized yet spontane
Whether the pond she's skating across is folk, pop-rock, or jazz, Joni Mitchell attacks song with an unfailing ear for off-kilter melody and poetically sparked lyrics. Her thirty-plus years as a musician have seen her experiment with many styles and join forces with players from Neil Young to Charles