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The Beats Books
Showing 1-50 of 380
On the Road (Paperback)
by (shelved 48 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.61 — 459,647 ratings — published 1957
Naked Lunch: The Restored Text (Paperback)
by (shelved 37 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.46 — 100,713 ratings — published 1959
Howl and Other Poems (Hardcover)
by (shelved 30 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.13 — 121,033 ratings — published 1956
The Dharma Bums (Paperback)
by (shelved 28 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.93 — 103,709 ratings — published 1958
Junky (Paperback)
by (shelved 24 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.84 — 73,600 ratings — published 1953
Big Sur (Paperback)
by (shelved 22 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.83 — 38,977 ratings — published 1962
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Hardcover)
by (shelved 21 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.72 — 15,551 ratings — published 1945
Desolation Angels (Paperback)
by (shelved 17 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.93 — 12,529 ratings — published 1958
The Subterraneans (Paperback)
by (shelved 17 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.64 — 17,256 ratings — published 1958
Queer (Paperback)
by (shelved 12 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.47 — 25,454 ratings — published 1985
Mexico City Blues (Paperback)
by (shelved 12 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.66 — 3,879 ratings — published 1959
Lonesome Traveler (Paperback)
by (shelved 11 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.74 — 8,328 ratings — published 1960
Kaddish and Other Poems (Paperback)
by (shelved 11 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.19 — 9,639 ratings — published 1961
Maggie Cassidy (Paperback)
by (shelved 10 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.59 — 5,577 ratings — published 1959
Visions of Cody (Paperback)
by (shelved 10 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.56 — 4,384 ratings — published 1959
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Hardcover)
by (shelved 10 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.20 — 795,091 ratings — published 1962
Tristessa (Paperback)
by (shelved 10 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.64 — 7,254 ratings — published 1960
Dr. Sax (Paperback)
by (shelved 10 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.39 — 3,704 ratings — published 1959
The Town and the City (Paperback)
by (shelved 9 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.93 — 3,992 ratings — published 1950
Visions of Gerard (Paperback)
by (shelved 9 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.75 — 3,385 ratings — published 1963
The Portable Beat Reader (Paperback)
by (shelved 8 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.16 — 7,928 ratings — published 1992
A Coney Island of the Mind (Paperback)
by (shelved 8 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.16 — 12,430 ratings — published 1958
On the Road: The Original Scroll (Paperback)
by (shelved 7 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.11 — 14,037 ratings — published 1957
The First Third (Paperback)
by (shelved 7 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.63 — 2,976 ratings — published 1971
Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (Hardcover)
by (shelved 7 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.08 — 1,226 ratings — published 1996
Kerouac: A Biography (Paperback)
by (shelved 6 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.11 — 1,695 ratings — published 1973
Scattered Poems (Paperback)
by (shelved 6 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.66 — 2,802 ratings — published 1971
Exterminator! (Paperback)
by (shelved 6 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.71 — 3,108 ratings — published 1973
Go (Penguin Modern Classics)
by (shelved 6 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.80 — 1,888 ratings — published 1952
Beat Generation (Hardcover)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.26 — 648 ratings — published 1992
The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats (Hardcover)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.05 — 365 ratings — published 2004
Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.94 — 2,564 ratings — published 1990
The Sea Is My Brother (Hardcover)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.62 — 3,158 ratings — published 2011
Pomes All Sizes (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.82 — 2,828 ratings — published 1992
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (Hardcover)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.21 — 848 ratings — published 2010
Memoirs of a Beatnik (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.68 — 3,742 ratings — published 1969
Collected Poems 1947-1997 (Hardcover)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.31 — 2,733 ratings — published 2006
The Soft Machine (The Nova Trilogy #1)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.43 — 7,211 ratings — published 1961
Some of the Dharma (Hardcover)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.92 — 1,463 ratings — published 1997
Satori in Paris & Pic (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.41 — 1,954 ratings — published 1985
Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.08 — 2,928 ratings — published 1983
Orpheus Emerged (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.24 — 835 ratings — published 2002
Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954 (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.20 — 767 ratings — published 1947
Collected Poems, 1947-1980 (paper)
by (shelved 5 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.18 — 7,068 ratings — published 1984
The Yage Letters (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.64 — 4,253 ratings — published 1963
Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46 (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.76 — 1,995 ratings — published 1967
The Rum Diary (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.85 — 67,447 ratings — published 1998
Women (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as the-beats)
avg rating 3.79 — 88,646 ratings — published 1978
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as the-beats)
avg rating 4.06 — 388,309 ratings — published 1971
“Who dreamt
and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together
jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame”
― Howl and Other Poems
and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together
jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame”
― Howl and Other Poems
“The institutionalization of the Beat ethic has been a moral, aesthetic, and intellectual disaster of the first order. (It has also been a disaster for fashion and manners, but that is a separate subject.) We owe to the 1960s the ultimate institutionalization of immoralist radicalism: the institutionalization of drugs, pseudo-spirituality, promiscuous sex, virulent anti-Americanism, naive anti-capitalism, and the precipitous decline of artistic and intellectual standards. But the1960s and 1970s only codified and extended into the middle class the radical spirit of the Beats, who, in more normal times, would have remained what they were in the beginning; members of a fringe movement that provided stand-up comics with material.”
― The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
― The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America


