Paradise Outlaws:

Remembering the Beats

by John Tytell, photographs by Mellon

Morrow, 224 pp., $24

A good study of the holy trinity of the Beat writers — Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg — would have to comment on the personal lives of the writers, the sources and mirrors of their art. John Tytell provides that perspective, including a wealth of photographs taken by his wife, Mellon, in this illustrated remembrance. But, like the Beats themselves, Tytell insists on being a constant, even overwhelming I. The middleman at this communion wants you to know exactly who’s responsible for putting that wafer on your tongue. Though Tytell is, as he tells us, a teacher of literature and an academic, his book feels more like an intensely narrated scrapbook than any kind of study — he practically stands over your shoulder, pointing excitedly to pictures and phrases as you read, saying, “That’s me with Ginsberg and Solomon and Orlovsky, on the right!” But there’s much in this book that will send you back (if you’ve been there before) to dig out On the Road or Naked Lunch or Howl and return to that no doubt freer-than-now place you inhabited when you read it the first time.

This article appears in January 14 • 2000.

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