The best portrait of Jay Landesman as a cultural conduit was written by Beat historian John Clellon Holmes, 'Most of the time, Landesman was that unique phenomenon in a status-drunk society: a man who knew that the only really hip style is the next one, the one that hasn't been established yet. In the late forties he shifted his attention to the popular arts without sacrificing his sense of the culture as a whole.' Landesman's significant contribution might be his originally conceived lifestyle which, set against the conformity of the Eisenhower years, places him at the heart of that group of...