Steven Belletto is Professor of English at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. He is author of No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012), editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017) and American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960 (2017). He is also co-editor of Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War (with Joseph Keith, 2019) and American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment (with Daniel Grausam, 2012). He is currently editor for the journal Contemporary Literature.
Part I. Get Hip, My Soul: How It All Started (1944-1948): 1. The wild outré gang of Columbia campus: the beginnings of a movement
2. Write for them about them personally: the Beats and avant-garde literary networks at midcentury
Part II. Underground to Literary Celebrity (1948-1957): 3. Hipsters in the zoo: how the Beats came up from the underground
4. The rise of the Beat novel: factualism to spontaneity
5. The rise of Beat poetry: raw experience meets raw language
Part III. The Beatnik Era and the Profusion of Beat Literature (1958-1962): 6. The establishment strikes back: Beat becomes Beatnik
7. Little magazines and subterranean networks
8. The opening of the field
9. Revisions of the real
10. Ignus: from the Beat Hotel to Pull My Daisy
Part IV. Beat Politics (1962-1969): 11. The women who said something
12. Liberating language
13. The Vietnam effect
Coda.
