 | Collected Poems 1947-1997 by Allen Ginsberg
Buy new: $17.15 / Used from: $14.09 The defining collection of Beat poetry.
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 | On the Road (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by Jack Kerouac
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $6.24 The Great American Beat Novel
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 | Naked Lunch: The Restored Text by William S. Burroughs
Buy new: $10.08 / Used from: $4.35 The third absolutely essential, defining text of the Beat Movement--and one of the weirdest works in all of American literature.
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 | The Portable Beat Reader
Buy new: $12.24 / Used from: $9.69 The only Beat anthology you will ever need. Practically a one-volume library of the movement.
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 | On the Road: The Original Scroll (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Jack Kerouac
Buy new: $10.40 / Used from: $9.25 Now we can finally read the book as Kerouac originally wrote it, before the editors tidied it up.
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 | Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960: On the Road / The Dharma Bums / The Subterraneans / Tristessa / Lonesome Traveler / Journal Selections (Library of America) by Jack Kerouac
Buy new: $23.10 / Used from: $17.98 Save a little money by buying all of Kerouac's road novels in this single-volume Library of America edition.
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 | Exterminator! by William S. Burroughs
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $1.24 More dark strangeness from the master Surrealist of the Beat Movement.
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 | Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs by Ted Morgan
Buy used from: $4.99 A very good Burroughs bio.
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| Ginsberg: A Biography by Barry Miles
Buy used from: $0.01 A fairly standard biography of AG that hits all the important points.
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 | Kerouac: A Biography by Ann Charters
Buy new: $12.91 / Used from: $3.75 Ann Charters, the foremost contemporary scholar of the Beat Movement, gives us a life of Jack.
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 | A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems (New Directions Paperback No. 74) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Buy new: $9.95 / Used from: $2.73 As I write this in late 2008, Larry Ferlinghetti is the last survivor of the Original Beats (OB). Long may his freak flag wave.
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 | Pictures of the Gone World (City Lights Pocket Poets Series) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Buy new: $7.95 / Used from: $3.90 More OB poetry from LF, the Old Master.
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 | Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation by John Tytell
Buy new: $13.22 / Used from: $1.37 The first major scholarly study of the Beats. Still an essential critical text.
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 | The Sheltering Sky (P.S.) by Paul Bowles
Buy new: $10.19 / Used from: $4.28 Bowles was a Beat fellow traveler of sorts. He was friendly with WB, AG and JK, and Burroughs considered this novel one of the greats books of the 20th century. He was not wrong.
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 | The Stories of Paul Bowles by Paul Bowles
Buy new: $16.96 / Used from: $7.98 Bowles's best short stories are as dark and haunting and indelible as any ever written by an American.
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 | Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer
Buy new: $21.79 / Used from: $12.66 Mailer tried to combine Beat notions of hipness with European existentialism. The jury is--amazingly--still out on how well he succeeded.
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 | Mexico City Blues: 242 Choruses by Jack Kerouac
Buy new: $9.89 / Used from: $2.97 Kerouac's poetry... Well, I'm not a fan of Jack's verse, but I can't deny it a place in an essential Beat bookshelf.
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