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 --
The Naz / Lord Buckley --
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 --
Marriage / Gregory Corso --
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 --
Roy Cohn / Gary Indiana --
The velvet well / Richard Prince --
Beatnik executives / Glenn O'Brien --
Sinatra walks out / Emily XYZ --
America / Eric Bogosian --
A modern man / George Carlin.
