In 1995, the Whitney Museum of American Art hung a show arguing that the Beats weren’t just a few novelists and a poem — they were a whole visual and cultural movement; this is the catalog for that show. The book runs about 280 pages with ten essays and 250-some illustrations. The reach is what makes it worth reading. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs are in there, sure, but so is Bruce Conner’s assemblage, Jay DeFeo’s giant painting, Wallace Berman, George Herms, Kienholz, Jess, Larry Rivers, Robert Frank’s pictures, Brakhage and Mekas and the underground film scene, bebop, Lenny Bruce, the obscenity trials, North Beach and the Ferus Gallery in LA. It came with a chronology and a bibliography that are still useful. The show got knocked around by critics who thought the museum was making a marketing package out of a bunch of outsiders, which was true, but the book stands apart. It’s out of print but worth finding.