beatniks

(Newser) - Barney Rosset, founder of the envelope-pushing, censorship-defying Grove Press, died at age 89 on Tuesday after a double-heart-valve replacement, the New York Times reports. The irascible Rosset once described his press as "a breach in the dam of American Puritanism," and it lived up to that name, publishing...

(Newser) - Poet and punk rocker Jim Carroll, 60, died of a heart attack Friday in his Manhattan home, the New York Times reports. Carroll is best known for The Basketball Diaries, a book about his experiences as a heroin-addicted basketball star in a New York City private school. A consummate New...

(Newser) - Beat lovers can check out the manuscript of Jack Kerouac's classic novel On the Road at the University of Texas, where it is displayed complete with scribbles and scratch outs. A long glass case allows visitors to view about a third of the book, which was written uninterrupted in a...

(Newser) - For today’s 50th anniversary of On the Road’s publication, Slate canvassed some of Jack Kerouac’s associates, creating a dramatic and nostalgic picture. The poet’s agent remembers he was thrown for a loop by the “demon” of “public reaction, celebrity,” and Carolyn Cassady recalls...