The Beat Generation & The Angry Young Men

New York: Citadel Press, 1958. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. An early anthology of the Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, Carl Solomon, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs (and William Lee), along with literary criticism by Kenneth Rexroth, and others.

384 pages. A book that tells a story about Larry McMurtry as a book scout. While he was also a Pulitzer Prize- and Academy Award-winning author, he was, most of the time, a bookseller first. This copy belonged to the acclaimed Texan Rolling Stone journalist Grover Lewis, who was a friend of McMurtry going back to their college days. Apparently, Lewis acquired this book in 1958, when he wrote his name on the front free endpaper. At some later point, the book ended up with an antiquarian bookseller, who catalogued it as having a "name inked on front free endpaper." Somehow, McMurtry either found this book in a bookstore or in one of many of the bookstores he bought out in their entirety. McMurtry saw his friend's name in the book, and then he added his stirrup bookplate and shelved the book in his home in Archer City, Texas, from which it came to your current cataloger via InkQ Rare Books. McMurtry likely found this in the pre-Internet era as the description is a typed carbon copy of the style used by booksellers in the late 1970s or 1980s.

In an essay about Lewis published in the Los Angeles Times after Lewis died (June 25, 1995), his friend Dave Hickey wrote that he liked to imagine, "Grover and his old running-mate, Larry McMurtry, back at North Texas State in the '50s: as campus pariahs, as these two skinny, four-eyed geeks in goofy '40s shirts, scuttling along the sidewalk head to head, toting copies of The Evergreen Review and plotting their mutual apotheosis-in the aftermath of which they would both be famous authors."

First edition (stated). A very good copy in a very good dust jacket that is a bit faded and is chipped at the top of the spine. with Lewis's ownership signature on the front free endpaper and McMurtry's bookplate.

A nice book connecting two friends and their love of literature.