The Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground: A Library of America Special Publication - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1598532561 ISBN 13: 9781598532562

Publisher: Library of America, 2013

Synopsis

Who were the original hipsters? In this dazzling collection, Glenn O’Brien provides a kaleidoscopic guided tour through the margins and subterranean tribes of mid-twentieth century America—the worlds of jazz, of disaffected postwar youth, of those alienated by racial and sexual exclusion, of outlaws and drug users creating their own dissident networks. Whether labeled as Bop or Beat or Punk, these outsider voices ignored or suppressed by the mainstream would merge and recombine in unpredictable ways, and change American culture forever.
 
To read The Cool School is to experience the energies of that vortex. Drawing on memoirs, poems, novels, comedy routines, letters, essays, and song lyrics, O’Brien creates an unparalleled literary mix tape bringing together Henry Miller, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac, Diane di Prima, Lenny Bruce, William S. Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Annie Ross, Norman Mailer, Terry Southern, Andy Warhol, Lester Bangs, and dozens of others, including such legendary figures as Beat avatar Neal Cassady, jazz memoirist Babs Gonzales, inspired comic improviser Lord Buckley, no-holds-barred essayist Seymour Krim, and underground filmmaker Jack Smith. His one-of-a-kind anthology recreates an unforgettable era in all its hallucinatory splendor: transgressive, raucous, unruly, harrowing, and often subversively hilarious.

About this title

About the Author:

Glenn O’Brien is the author of Soapbox, Human Nature: Dubbed Version, and How To Be A Man. A former editor at Interview, Rolling Stone, Spin, and High Times, he writes frequently on contemporary art, supplied the lead catalog essay to the Whitney Museum exhibition “Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-65,” and is a contributing editor at Ten, L’Officiel Homme, and GQ, where he writes the “Style Guy” column.

From Booklist:

O’Brien has been on the cutting edge since his days at Andy Warhol’s Interview and through stints at Rolling Stone, Spin, High Times, and GQ, where he’s the “Style Guy.” In his rev-it-up introduction to this brilliantly conceived, must-have Library of America anthology, he orients us to what the original hipster—outlaw, misfit, rebel, heretic—was all about and how hipster language embodies radical points of view and ways of being. O’Brien also tells us, “Cool is like grace. It can be sold but not bought.” So who are the exemplars of cool according to O’Brien? The Beats contingent is here, of course, and so are establishment-blasting comedians Lord Buckley, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and George Carlin. Indelible passages from the autobiographies of jazz musicians Mezz Mezzrow, Miles Davis, and Art Pepper cast light on the dangers of all-out creativity. Norman Mailer’s knockout manifesto, “The White Negro,” is as riling now as it was in 1957, as is Seymour Krim’s electrifying 1961 riff on “making it.” With Ishmael Reed, Nick Tosches, Lester Bangs, and dozens more, this is one red-hot book of cool. --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Library of America
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1598532561
• ISBN 13: 9781598532562
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 500
• Editor: O'Brien Glenn