The Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground

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Who were the original hipsters? In this dazzling collection, Glenn O’Brien provides a kaleidoscopic guided tour through the subterranean scenes and tribes that gave birth to cool: the worlds of jazz, of disaffected postwar youth, of the racially and sexually excluded, of outlaws and drug users creating their own dissident networks. Whether labeled Bop or Beat or Punk, these outsider voices would merge and recombine in surprising ways, changing America forever. To read The Cool School is to experience the energies of that vortex. Drawing on memoirs, poems, novels, comedy routines, letters, essays, and song lyrics, O’Brien creates an unparalleled literary mixtape spanning decades of tumultuous and exuberant change. In the Forties, the era when the strands of hip begin to converge, Miles Davis joins Charlie Parker in a revolutionary musical collaboration that also signals a revolution in attitude; Henry Miller, back from Paris, dissects the grotesque hypocrisies of a Hollywood dinner party; and Beat avatar Neal Cassady writes to Jack Kerouac about his life on the road. The Fifties sees the flowering of the Beats, in such voices as Kerouac, Diane di Prima, and Gregory Corso; Chandler Brossard and Terry Southern take sharp and satirical looks at the burgeoning hipster culture; Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl create a new outspoken form of stand-up comedy; and comedy maverick Del Close provides a glossary of “How to Talk Hip.” The cultural maelstrom of the Sixties and Seventies finds expression in the apocalyptic cut-ups of William S. Burroughs, the free-form fictions of Ishmael Reed and Richard Brautigan, and Andy Warhol’s reel-to-reel transcription of a speed-fueled night world. Bob Dylan recreates the Village folk scene, Ed Sanders celebrates poetic orgies, and Hunter S. Thompson plunges into the twisted heart of Las Vegas. The Cool School tracks as well the succeeding generations of writers who have extended the terrain of their underground predecessors and continue to push against the enticements of mainstream America, including such contemporaries as Nick Tosches, Iris Owens, Lynne Tillman, Gary Indiana, and Eric Bogosian—all the way to a brilliant coda provided by the late George Carlin. This one-of-a-kind anthology—“a possible textbook for Outlier Lit 101” in Glenn O’Brien’s words—recreates an unforgettable era in all its hallucinatory splendor: transgressive, raucous, unruly, harrowing, and often subversively hilarious.