The Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground: A Library of America Special Publication

An unparalleled literary mix tape that brings together the subversive works of Henry Miller Miles Davis Jack Kerouac and many others Who were the original hipsters? In this dazzling collection Glenn OBrien provides a kaleidoscopic guided tour through the margins and subterranean tribes of mid-twentieth century Americathe worlds of jazz of disaffected postwar youth of those alienated by racial and sexual exclusion of outlaws and drug users creating their own dissident networks. Whether labeled as Bop or Beat or Punk these outsider voices ignored or suppressed by the mainstream would merge and recombine in unpredictable ways and change American culture forever. To read The Cool School is to experience the energies of that vortex. Drawing on memoirs poems novels comedy routines letters essays and song lyrics OBriens collection brings together Henry Miller Miles Davis Jack Kerouac Diane di Prima Lenny Bruce William S. Burroughs Bob Dylan Annie Ross Norman Mailer Terry Southern Andy Warhol Lester Bangs and dozens of others including such legendary figures as Beat avatar Neal Cassady jazz memoirist Babs Gonzales inspired comic improviser Lord Buckley no-holds-barred essayist Seymour Krim and underground filmmaker Jack Smith. His one-of-a-kind anthology recreates an unforgettable era in all its hallucinatory splendor: transgressive raucous unruly harrowing and often subversively hilarious.