How much did making it new have to do with making it? For the four outsider poets considered here, the connection was everything. Both a social history of literary ambition in America in the 1950s and 1960s and a collective literary biography, this is an account of postwar poetry underground.

Philosophers and theorists have long recognized both the subversive and the transformative possibilities of friendship, the intimacy of which can transcend the impersonality of such identity categories as race, class, or gender. Unlike familial relations, friendships are chosen, opening a space of relative freedom in which to create and explore new identities. This process has been particularly valuable to poets marginalized by gender or sexuality since the second half of the twentieth century, as friendship provides both a buffer against and a wedge into predominantly male homosocial poetic...