Women Writers of the Beat Era

Jack Kerouac was among the first to hail beat generation writers for demonstrating a new and iconoclastic brand of masculinity in Cold War America. Following his lead, historians of Kerouac's beats have generally tended to define the beats as a male coterie in rebellion against post–World War II middle-class conventions in general and female domesticity in particular. Dominating magazine articles, interviews, anthologies, and histories were Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Ray Bremser, LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and John Clellon Holmes; rarely was there significant mention of women writers among the beats. In fact, women fit among the beats only in two limited and highly stereotyped roles—would-be housewives and caretakers and hypersexualized “girls”—in Kerouac's wording—who “say nothing and wear black” (p. 16). It is no wonder that one of the beats' most famous and prolific women writers—Diane Di Prima, the author of more than thirty books of poetry—quite simply felt invisible, as she recalled in her second autobiography Recollections of My Life as a Woman (2001). Mary Paniccia Carden's most significant accomplishment in Women Writers of the Beat Era is to make visible Di Prima's life and work among the beats through Di Prima's autobiographical writings and the life writing of the era's most significant and most overlooked women poets—Bonnie Bremser, ruth weiss, Joanne Kyger, Joyce Johnson, and Hettie Jones

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