Long-lost letter that inspired On the Road uncovered
For fifty years, Beat poet Gerd Stern has been blamed for discarding a letter that Jack Kerouac described as “the greatest piece of writing I ever saw,” a move that… Read more »
Rejoice! Baffler archives to baffle the internet
Great news! The Baffler, America’s favorite curmudgeonly left-wing magazine, has unearthed, excavated, and digitized its past. And what a past it is! All of The Baffler’s back issues (which have,… Read more »
Fighting the blank page: how famous writers stopped procrastinating
Do you tell people you’re writing a novel? It might be better to go with something like, “I am trying to write a novel,” because if you are indeed tackling… Read more »
Hollywood’s rare book collectors
One would think that Hollywood bibliophiles would be flashy collectors, using the purchase receipts of valuable books to demonstrate some intellectual inner life that the tabloids usually strip them of.… 3 / Read more »
Literary correspondence: T.S. Eliot ‘handsome’, Burroughs ‘has gone insane’
How about this for a delightful literary correspondence? In 1961, Electric Literature tells us, Groucho Marx received a request for a portrait from none other than T.S. Eliot. Presumably slightly bemused… Read more »
Recordings of famous poets and troublemakers
If you’re in New York and for some ungodly reason find yourself in midtown, you might want to swing by The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound on the… 2 / Read more »