Typewriter Is Holy

In this highly entertaining work, Bill Morgan,a leading authority on the movement and a man who personally knew most of the Beats, narrates the history of these writers as primarily a social group of friends, tracing their origins together during the World War II years to the full blossoming of their notoriety in the late 1950s to their profound influence on the social upheaval of the 1960s. Indeed, it is impossible to comprehend the sixties without first grasping the importance of the social ripples set in motion by the Beats a decade earlier. This is a sweeping, indispensable story about the discontented free spirits of the Beat Movement. We watch their peripatetic lives, their sexual misadventures, their ambivalent response to fame. We are reminded above all that while their personal lives may have not have been holy, their typewriters and their lasting words very much were.

"The Typewriter is Holy is a wonderful romp, a totally engrossing history of the Beat generation, and those wildly colorful figures who brought about a seismic change in our culture. It makes sense of the intersecting lives of Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs and others whose great adventures gave birth to the upheavals of the Sixties. No one alive knows these people as well as Bill Morgan does, and the result is a fascinating chronicle.” —Dinitia Smith, author of The Illusionist and Remember This, “At long last we have a first-rate history of the Beat Generation! Bill Morgan’s The Typewriter Is Holy not only explores the enduring revolutionary appeal of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs but proudly brings marvelous lesser known Beat artists like Alan Ansen and Joanne Kyger into the Main Game mix. A masterful synthesis brimming with clarity and erudition” —Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University and editor of Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947-1954., "Bill Morgan draws on an encyclopedic knowledge of the Beat writers to shine sober, sympathetic light into the dark corners of four tortured lives. His painfully personal profiles of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William Burroughs show how their misguided search for personal freedom trapped them in their own obsessions and addictions, yet also sparked an enlivening burst of creative genius." -- Don Lattin, author of The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America.

Bill Morgan is the author and editor of more than a dozen books about the Beat writers, including the acclaimed biography, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. For nearly forty years he has worked as an editor and archival consultant for nearly every member of the Beat Generation including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Diane Di Prima, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Edie Kerouac. He lives in Vermont.