Essays and reviews that trace the changes in Ginsberg's career and in his poetry

Verses about sex, death, revolution and America

Avant-garde poet and popular culture icon, Allen Ginsberg has been one of the world's most important writers for over 40 years. This comprehensive bibliography, covering the years 1941 to 1994, was prepared with the cooperation of the poet himself. All books, periodicals, photographs, recordings, films, and miscellaneous appearances are listed here. Entries are grouped in chapters according to type of work, and each entry provides full descriptive bibliographic information. Allen Ginsberg is perhaps the most famous poet of our time, as well as one of our most prolific writers. His subjects range from Buddhist studies to drug research to gay rights to political issues of every description from Vietnam to censorship. Ginsberg gave the author access to personal files and, as a result, every appearance of Ginsberg's writings in the English language is noted. This bibliography is a comprehensive, descriptive record of all of Ginsberg's works. The volume contains descriptive annotations of every book, pamphlet, and broadside by Ginsberg. It also contains complete descriptions of every contribution by Ginsberg to the works of others. In addition, all periodical contributions, recordings, films, and miscellaneous publications are listed. Due to Ginsberg's recent acceptance as a photographer of note, a special section identifies all of his published photographs. Entries are arranged in chapters according to the type of work, to facilitate ease of use. As a result, this book presents a history of Ginsberg's works and traces the evolution of his writings over a period of publications and revisions.

From the Publisher: While critics have long disparaged commercial television as a vast wasteland, TV has surprising links to the urbane world of modern art that stretch back to the 1950s and '60s during that era, the rapid rise of commercial television coincided with dynamic new movements in the visual arts-a potent combination that precipitated a major shift in the way Americans experienced the world visually. TV by Design uncovers this captivating story of how modernism and network television converged and intertwined in their mutual ascent during the decades of the cold war. Whereas most histories of television focus on the way older forms of entertainment were recycled for the new medium, Lynn Spigel shows how TV was instrumental in introducing the public to the latest trends in art and design. Abstract expressionism, pop art, art cinema, modern architecture, and cutting-edge graphic design were all mined for staging techniques, scenic designs, and an ever-growing number of commercials. As a result, TV helped fuel the public craze for trendy modern products, such as tailfin cars and boomerang coffee tables, that was vital to the burgeoning postwar economy. And along with influencing the look of television, many artists-including Eero Saarinen, Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, William Golden, and Richard Avedon-also participated in its creation as the networks put them to work designing everything from their corporate headquarters to their company cufflinks. Dizzy Gillespie, Ernie Kovacs, Duke Ellington, and Andy Warhol all stop by in this imaginative and winning account of the ways in which art, television, and commerce merged in the first decades of the TV age.

Focuses on some of the most popular writers of the last forty years. One of the few books to explore the role of women and gender in the Beat movement.

How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.