Jim Burns continues his critical history of off-beat writers, artists and jazz musicians of the last century. This is volume 4 of his acclaimed series of essays.

This sixth selection of essays and reviews looks at a whole list of writers, poets, political activists and others who can be claimed to be rebels in their various ways. The strange communist Joseph Pogany or John Pepper, as he was known in America, is here, as is B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in his earlier role as Ret Marut, a German revolutionary. There are essays about communism in Hollywood and about Henry Miller and the writing of The Tropic of Cancer. Beat novelists, bohemians in Paris and elsewhere, jazz musicians like Lester Young and Charlie Parker,...

Essays on Beat and Bohemian writers, artists and Jazz musicians

This seventh collection of essays and reviews kicks off with a survey of some overlooked British poets from the 1940s who, through a network of little magazines with anarchist inclinations, attempted to offer an alternative to the MacSpaunDay generation's sensibilities. Another piece considers how British writers were monitored by MI5 and local police forces, while a third switches attention to the USA and looks at the still-controversial case of Alger Hiss and his alleged role as a spy who passed information to Russia. There are essays about lesser-known Beat-related writers like Bob Kaufman...