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Article: Wild at heart.(American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation; collected letters: 1944--1967)(Book Review)
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- June 14, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation.
By Jonah Raskin. California. 295 pp. $24.95.
collected letters: 1944--1967. By Neal Cassady. Edited by Dave Moore. Introduced by Carolyn Cassady. Penguin. 512 pp.
$18.
In 1947 Saul Bellow published a novel called The Victim in which a derelict character named Kirby Allbee haunts another named Asa Leventhal, claiming that Leventhal is responsible for his downfall. Kirby, one of Bellow's fabled fast talkers--all feverish self-abasement and joking insult--repeatedly baits Leventhal and at one point, when Leventhal murmurs something about Walt Whitman, says to ...