Introduction

Time has long installed "The Beats" as a familiar, even fixed, pantheon. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs are to be thought the helmsmen, the enduring presences. Gregory Corso holds sway as both fellow Beat poet-adventurer and yet the rapscallion one-off. Decades subsequently as may be, and now into a new century, the great signature trilogy of canonical Beat texts continue to seize attention: "Howl" as Ginsberg's "holy litany", On the Road with its ethos of "the road is life", and Naked Lunch whose dark-matter wit and vision of control as virus puts it at the forefront of postmodern narrative. Afro-America contributes its necessary roster, a historic jazz and text lineage in which Harlem, Dixie, and the West Coast all enter as sites and histories. Beat, in other words, has long moved on not only from the one pre-emptive canon but also from the one geocentric location.