Publisher's Synopsis
"Part road novel and part reality-inspired fiction, Beat Blues : San Francisco, 1955 explores a time and a place when the American counter-culture was born, southern racism was exposed, and the Cold War began to thaw with the publication of Ginsberg's Howl, Kerouac's On the Road, Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind, Bob Kaufman's Abomunist Manifesto and the magazine "Beatitude." Beat Blues takes readers behind the scenes at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore and into the enclaves of San Francisco where Bohemians, artists and hipsters dig jazz greats and rub shoulders with Gregory Corso, Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir. Rendezvous with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Bob Kaufman, Neal Cassady and their near constant companion, Natalie Jackson, all of them on the border that divides anonymity from notoriety and madness from sanity. Beat Blues observes the Beat phenomena through the eyes of Norman de Haan, an ex-New Yo
