Rebels, Beats and Poets

This sixth selection of essays and reviews looks at a whole list of writers, poets, political activists and others who can be claimed to be rebels in their various ways. The strange communist Joseph Pogany or John Pepper, as he was known in America, is here, as is B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in his earlier role as Ret Marut, a German revolutionary. There are essays about communism in Hollywood and about Henry Miller and the writing of The Tropic of Cancer. Beat novelists, bohemians in Paris and elsewhere, jazz musicians like Lester Young and Charlie Parker, surrealism in Prague, and the underground in Amsterdam, all take their place in this wide-ranging survey.