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Criticism The Beat Generation: Critical Essays. Kostas Myrsiades, ed. New York. Peter Lang. 2002. × + 352 pages. $29.95. ISBN 0-8204-5778-7
How MUCH SIMPLER the academic world was in 1963, when I assigned Jack Kerouac's On the Road to my freshman English class, the first instructor to do so in my department at a large urban university in Brooklyn. My dean responded to the phone calls of several parents protesting their children's exposure to "beatniks" by explaining the principle of academic freedom to them, and that was that. The significant line of resistance these days, according to Robert Bennett's enlightening introductory essay to this collection, "Teaching the Beat Generation to Generation X," has been drawn within the...