In 1961, Beat writer Seymour Krim set Greenwich Village on its ear with a slim volume of essays that featured an unleashed voice, a brash title, and a foreword by Norman Mailer. James Baldwin called Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer an "extraordinary volume." Saul Bellow published an excerpt in his journal The Noble Savage, and Mailer saluted Krim s jazzy prose with its "shifts and shatterings of mood." Despite such praise and critical attention, Krim s work is excluded from most Beat anthologies and is little known outside literary circles. With Missing a Beat, a collection of eighteen...