Beat lives - 13 San Fransisco-based artists of the fifties

In Beat Culture and the New America (1996), Lisa Philips writes that «...much of the subject matter of acknowledged masterpieces of Beat art and poetry concerns itself with documenting the unknowns». Still, scholarship has a preoccupation with the canon of the greats, particularly the trio Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs leaving so many so-called «minor» figures in the shadows. This study contributes to the mapping of these unknowns by presenting 13 artists from the Californian underground in the 1950s and 1960s. The book is a contribution to a wider understanding of beat culture and of lives lived underground.