"Fred W. McDarrah - for the past twenty-five years the picture editor of The Village Voice - was present, camera in hand, when the Beats first came east to Greenwich Village. Kerouac and Friends is the definitive photographic record of that period of American literary history. Along with his own remarkable photographs, McDarrah has gathered written documents as well: the writings of some of America's greatest critics, journalists, and historians on the Beat Generation. Here is John Clellon Holmes with the first definition of the term "beat", Kenneth Rexroth on jazz and poetry, Diana Trilling, John Ciardi, Seymour Krim, and even an angry denunciation of the Beats and their work by Norman Podhoretz. All of the great names of the generation are here - those who have endured like Mailer, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Baraka, Silverstein, Baldwin, and those now only dimly remembered as part of the world the Beats created. The photos depict a Greenwich Village that is no more : quaint folk dancing in Washington Square Park, the Cafe Bizarre, the Eighth Street Bookshop, and Charlie Mingus and Kenneth Patchen doing a jazz and poetry recital at the Living Theater. These photographs - more than 190 in all - and the texts that accompany them form at once an important historical document and a nostalgic look back at a special time in the history of American life and letters." -- publisher's statement.