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 Fariña, 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.

Mori and her friends Julia, Benji, and Theo have never seen life beyond the walls of their perfect society, Old Harmonie. That changes when their new friend Ilana is threatened by the rules that are supposed to keep them all safe. They escape together, hoping to find help in Boston with Dr. Agatha Varden, one of Old Harmonie's pioneering founders. But the outside world is nothing like they anticipated. As they face challenges they never expected and encounter a group of kids from the outside, Mori and the others begin to understand the complicated reality of their supposedly perfect community. With the help of these new friends, they just might be able to save Ilana . . . but at what cost? This thought-provoking sequel to Megan Frazer Blakemore's stunningly imaginative novel, The Firefly Code, gives readers a chance to see our world in a brand new light.

Includes approximately 800 British and American poets, past and present, with criticisms drawn from more than 160 journals and 300 books

In this sixth installment in the popular Mail Order Bride series, Dorianne DeFeo is a lovely, loyal daughter to widower Franco DeFeo, who works on the docks in Brooklyn. When Franco catches two fellow workers smuggling diamonds, they stab him and he dies in Dori's arms. Persevering through her grief, Dori finds her employment opportunities diminishing and finally answers an ad from Arizona lawman Stone McKenna for a mail-order bride. Traveling west, Dori experiences another shock, and her tired mind shields her from more hurt with a psychologically induced blindness. Will Stone still want his bride now that she's blind? Will the young couple let God penetrate their pain? Can a miracle accomplish what medicine can't? Together Dori and Stone await the daybreak in the darkness of their lives.

To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe. In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city. The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.