Hard to Be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats [Paperback]

An exploration of Beat spirituality--seen through excerpts from the writings of the seminal writers of Beat Generation themselves.

It’s been said that Jack Kerouac made it cool to be a thinking person seeking a spiritual experience. And there is no doubt that the writers he knew and inspired—iconic figures like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure—were thinkers seeking exactly that. In this re-claiming of their vision, Robert Inchausti explores the Beat canon to reveal that the movement was at heart a spiritual one. It goes deeper than the Buddhism with which many of the key figures became identified. It’s about their shared perception of an existence in which the Divine reveals itself in the ordinary. Theirs is a spirituality where real life triumphs over airy ideals and personal authenticity becomes both the content and the vehicle for a kind of refurbished American Transcendentalism.“In Hard to be a Saint in the City, the rigorous and dynamic Robert Inchausti threads the singular voices of the beat generation into an inspired ensemble of edited voices that lifts up insight after insight. As a whole, their depth and innovation speak to the strength and tear of American life and, even more, to the enduring proposition, held in the chapter title, that “The Universe is the Messiah.” This book offers a one-of-a-kind recording from the basement of America where spiritual riffs awakened our sudden connection to a timeless consciousness that gave rise to the sixties. More relevant than ever!”—Mark Nepo, author of The Book of Awakening and More Together Than Alone

“Long ago a ‘commonplace book’ was a widely known and useful tool for preserving pithy statements and nuggets ol3$