Towards the end of his life Burroughs was writing only in his journals. These are the final thoughts of one of the world's most extraordinary writers, who died in 1997, after a lifetime of notoriety - the granddaddy of the Beats, druggy, dangerous and bleak.

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs had all seen the inside of mental hospitals and prisons by the age of 30. This book charts the transformation of these experiences into a literary movement that spread across the globe in the decade and a half that followed World War II.

Covering his life from his birth in 1926 to his career as a distinguished poet and professor, this is a biography of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Barry Miles draws on their long friendship and on Ginsberg's own journals and correspondence to give a full account of his life up to his death in 1997.

This reader contains the full texts of Herbert Huncke's out-of-print works, Huncke's Journal and The Evening Sun Turned Crimson , and a wide selection from his other published and unpublished poems, stories, memoirs, letters and diaries.