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The Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground

By Glenn O'Brien
The Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground by Glenn O'Brien digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

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 O’Brien provides a kaleidoscopic guided tour through the margins and subterranean tribes of mid-twentieth century America—the 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, O’Brien's 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.

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About Glenn O'Brien

Glenn O’Brien is the author of Soapbox, Human Nature: Dubbed Version, and How To Be A Man. A former editor at Interview, Rolling Stone, Spin, and High Times, he writes frequently on contemporary art, supplied the lead catalog essay to the Whitney Museum exhibition “Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-65,” and is a contributing editor at Ten, L’Officiel Homme, and GQ, where he writes the “Style Guy” column.

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