The Beat Hotel has been closed for nearly forty years. But for a brief period, from just after the publication of 'Howl' in 1957 until the building was sold in 1963, it was home to Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin and a host of other luminaries of the Beat Generation.
Now, Barry Miles, author of many books on the Beats and a personal acquaintance of many of them, recreates vividly this remarkable period and restores it to a historical picture that has, until now, been skewed in favour of America. Drawing on diaries, letters and many original interviews, this book is the first detailed account of a defining time and place for some of the twentieth century's most daring and notorious authors.
