The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation

In these critical essays Gregory Stephenson takes the reader on a journey through the literature of the Beat Generation: a journey encompassing that common ethos of Beat literature— the passage from darkness to light, from fragmented being toward wholeness, from Beat to Beatific. He travels through Jack Kerouac’ s Duluoz Legend, following Kerouac’ s quests for identity, community, and spiritual knowledge. He examines Allen Ginsberg’ s use of transcendence in “ Howl,” discovers the Gnostic vision in William S. Burroughs’ s fiction, and studies the mythic, visionary power of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’ s poetry. Stephenson also provides detailed examinations of the writing of lesser-known Beat authors: John Clellon Holmes, Gregory Corso, Richard Fariń a, and Michael McClure. He explores the myth and the mystery of the literary legend of Neal Cassady. The book concludes with a look at the common traits of the Beat writers— their use of primitivism, shamanism, myth and magic, spontaneity, and improvisation, all of which led them to a new idiom of consciousness and to the expansion of the parameters of American literature.