Introduction / by Glenn O'Brien
If you can't make money / Mezz Mezzrow, Bernard Wolfe
Miles: the autobiography [excerpt] / Miles Davis
Soirée in Hollywood / Henry Miller
I paid my dues [excerpt] / Babs Gonzales
Spencer's pad / Herbert Huncke
A diabolist / Carl Solomon
Letter to Jack Kerouac, March 7, 1947 (Kansas City, Mo.) / Neal Cassady
A portrait of the hipster / Anatole Broyard
Hamlet, or There is something wrong with everyone / Delmore Schwartz
Who walk in darkness [excerpt] / Chandler Brossard
You're too hip, baby / Terry Southern
Parker's mood / King Pleasure
Memoirs of a beatnik / Diane Di Prima
The origins of the beat generation / Jack Kerouac
Minor characters [excerpt] / Joyce Johnson
Walking Parker home / Bob Kaufman
Lesterparis59 / Lester Young, François Postif
The white Negro / Norman Mailer
The day Lady died / Frank O'Hara
The screamers / Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones)
Cain's book [excerpt] / Alexander Trocchi
The ballad of the sad young men / Fran Landesman
The pop imagination / John Clellon Holmes
Making it! / Seymour Krim
Dictionary of hip words and phrases / Del Close
Pills and shit: the drug scene / Lenny Bruce
The Billy Graham rally / Mort Sahl
Chronicles: Volume One [excerpt] / Bob Dylan
The perfect filmic appositeness of Maria Montez / Jack Smith
Last words / William S. Burroughs
Siobhan McKenna group-grope / Ed Sanders
Nog [excerpt] / Rudolph Wurlitzer
The process [excerpt] / Brion Gysin
Mumbo jumbo [excerpt] / Ishmael Reed
Frenchy and Cuban Pete / Bobbie Louise Hawkins
The Kool-Aid wino / Richard Brautigan
a: a novel [excerpt] / Andy Warhol
Photos of an artist as a young man / Gerard Malanga
Dino [excerpt] / Nick Tosches
Fear and loathing in Las Vegas [excerpt] / Hunter S. Thompson
Luckies vs. Camels: Who will win? / Richard Meltzer
How I became one of the invisible / David Rattray
After Claude [excerpt] / Iris Owens
How to succceed in torture without really trying / Lester Bangs
Blank generation / Richard Hell
Madame Realism asks what's natural about painting? / Lynne Tillman
The velvet well / Richard Prince
Beatnik executives / Glenn O'Brien
Sinatra walks out / Emily XYZ
A modern man / George Carlin.
