Immediately after the 2008 election, the former French minister of culture Jack Lang hailed President-elect Barack Obama as “the kind of American we love. His is the America of jazz and Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Kerouac and Kennedy.” That “the King of the Beats” would be linked to two of the nation's most admired novelists and to the most beloved of postwar Presidents is one index of the fascination that a literary movement spawned at the scraggly margins of an affluent society continues to exert. Whatever the merits of On the Road and the whole “Legend of Duluoz” series, only the most daring or eccentric of critics would express comparable enthusiasm for Yoknapatawpha County or for The Great Gatsby. The special merit of Christopher Gair's supremely intelligent study is its awareness that the Beats still attract attention for extra-literary reasons. The disheveled lives that these novelists, poets, and wannabe literati led cannot be separated from the heartfelt works they left behind. This slim volume is therefore a contribution to social history; belles-lettres is only part of the story, if that. The Beats celebrated freedom, yet also exuded danger that crossed the line into homicide. They wanted “kicks,” but sometimes flirted with the madness that could be reconfigured as social criticism. They produced at least two great poems (“Howl” and “Kaddish”). But they also brandished the rap sheets of criminals. Such combinations are irresistible.

The Beat Generation treats its subject sympathetically and perhaps even a little generously, and within the limitations of brevity is quite comprehensive as well. John Clellon Holmes, the author of Go, is included, even though he was more observer than participant. The women who hooked up with this movement are among the “Other Voices,” and Gair analyzes their memoirs of relationships with writers who cherished a homosocial environment. The weakest chapter consists of obligatory summations of Kerouac's dozen novels, which not even Gair's fluency and crispness can bring to life.

He is at his best in complicating the very meaning of the noun in his title. In 1957, when Kerouac got famous, he was too old (b. 1922) to be an authentic spokesman for the young, who by then were digging rock ‘n’ roll rather than jazz. He had already written, starting in the previous decade, several of the novels that he had not yet managed to get published. William Burroughs was even older (b. 1914), and shunned the public role that proved too much for the hard-drinking Kerouac. The Beats constituted a “generation” of shifting and thin connections, united less by common experiences than by urgent emancipatory needs. Not only did roads to liberation and enlightenment cross the continent, between New York and San Francisco. Doors of perception also opened in Mexico, Tangier, India, and Japan. Thus parochialism did not hamper the Beats, whom this book nicely situates within an international setting where their allure continues to be felt.