Witness not only such beat–
colored specimens as
The Con"
nection,
as Alexander Trocchi's
brilliant
Cain's Book,
as William
Burrough's dadaist shocker
Na–
ked Lunch,
but such non-beat
examples as Michael Gazzo's
Broadway hit
A Hatful of Rain,
or Willard Motley's best-selling
Let No Man Write
my
Epitaph
- all products of the last few
years. The world of the addict
is a very special, even esoteric,
world. Yet how many laymen
are nowadays privy to its grisly
secrets? Perhaps millions have
learned the recipe for cooking
up a fix: the eyedropper, the
hardened cotton, the bubbling
spoon.
Archaic and savage narcotics
laws have yet to catch up with
the changing cultural image,
but the fact remains that the
image
is
changing. Our litera–
ture suggests that this nation in
which Miltown sales yearly
mount is increasingly sympa–
thetic to, indeed fascinated by,
its citizens who go the whole
hog. The addict is nearer than
ever before to social acceptance
.- if not in our cities, at least
in our psyches.
What kind of fiction and
plays has it allIed to? The range
is
wide. It
is
possible to say,
however, that in general the
725
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Literature and poetry
on
the
American scene-
RADICAL
INNOCENCE
The Contemporary
American Novel
By Ihab Haasan
J. D. Salinger, Truman
Capote, Carson McCullers,
Saul Bellow, Jack Kerouac,
Norman Mailer, James
Jones, William Styron, and
John Cheever are a few of
the novelists discussed in
this deeply perceptive ap–
preciation of the literary
generation that has gained
prominence since WorId
War II. "The best treat–
ment yet attempted on a
body of fiction that will
have
to
receive critical at-
, tention for some years
to
come."-Carlo8 Baker
$6.00
THE CONTINUITY OF
AMERICAN POETRY
By Roy Harvey Pearce
The first comprehensive
study of the tradition of
American poetry - begin–
ning with the works of Ed–
ward Taylor and recently
discovered poets of the Pur–
itan imagination, through
the modern speech of
E. E. Cummings, Marianne
Moore, Wallace Stevens,
T. S. Eliot, and others. $7.50
AI
)'OU'
boolulo,.
I
D'·
Princeton University
I
Press
.
Princeton, N.
J.
I
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