Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation

What do we know about the women who played an important role in creating the literature of the Beat Generation? Until recently, very little. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs have come to typify this iconoclastic cold war -- and nearly completely masculine -- scene. Studies of the movement have effaced or excluded women writers, such as Elise Cowen, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Hettie Jones, and Diane Di Prima, each one a significant figure of the postwar Beat communities. Equally free-thinking and innovative as the founding generation of men, women writers, fluent in Beat, hippie, and women's movement idioms, partook of and bridged two important countercultures of the American mid-century. Persistently foregrounding female experiences in the cold war 1950s and in the counterculture 1960s and in every decade up to the millennium, women writing Beat have brought nonconformity, skepticism, and gender dissent to postmodern culture and literary production in the United States and beyond.

The contributors to Girls Who Wore Black fill the gap in critical consideration of women writers of the Beat Generation and evaluate their lives and literary output, helping us to appreciate their unique, diverse voices during a dynamic moment of profound and far-reaching cultural change. The text is enhanced with photographs and a selected bibliography for each featured writer.