. . absolutely magnificent."--San Francisco ChronicleJack Kerouac--"King of the Beats," unwitting catalyst for the '60s counterculture, groundbreaking author--was a complex and compelling man: a star athlete with a literary bent; a spontaneous writer vilified by the New Critics but adored by a large, youthful readership; a devout Catholic but aspiring Buddhist; a lover of freedom plagued by crippling alcoholism. Desolate Angel follows Kerouac from his childhood in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, to his early years at Columbia where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, beginning a four-way friendship that would become a sociointellectual legend. In rich detail and with sensitivity, Dennis McNally recounts Kerouac's frenetic cross-country journeys, his experiments with drugs and sexuality, his travels to Mexico and Tangier, the sudden fame that followed the publication of On the Road, the years of literary triumph, and the final near-decade of frustration and depression.Desolate Angel is a harrowing, compassionate portrait of a man and an artist set in an extraordinary social context. The metamorphosis of America from the Great Depression to the Kennedy administration is not merely the backdrop for Kerouac's life but is revealed to be an essential element of his art . . . for Kerouac was above all a witness to his exceptional times.

    Recounts the first contact made by a group of friends with a mass of spirits known as Michael, sharing the voices' messages on life and beyond.

    The volume is introduced by Sheridan Morley, Coward's first biographer."Hay Fever," a comedy of bad manners, concerns a weekend with friends of the Bliss family, who have all been invited independently for a weekend at their country house near Maidenhead. "The Vortex "was a controversial drama in its time, introducing drug-addiction onto the stage at a time when alcoholism was barely mentioned. "Fallen Angels," which is written for two star actresses was described as 'degenerate', 'vile', 'obscene', 'shocking' - the second half of the play is entirely taken up with an alcoholic duologue between the two women. "Easy Virtue" is an elegant, laconic tribute to a lost world of drawing-room dramas, no other writer went more directly to the jugular of that moralistic, tight-lipped but fundamentally hypocritical 20s society.

    She was twenty-four when she and three companions crossed the Sahara by Landrover. But the two men of the party took the car and left her and her friend Lesley stranded in the middle of Nigeria.Recounted with modesty and good humour, it is a story of great tenacity and incredible courage. Christina travelled by horse, camel, on foot, hitching lifts from time to time—even hailing passing airplanes out of the sky!The author shared meals with cannibals, was treated by witch-doctors, learned to pan gold, and was imprisoned on a boat by a sexually perverse sea captain. She and her friend journeyed almost a thousand miles down the Congo River in a dugout canoe: the first women in the world to accomplish such a hazardous journey.This is a truly extraordinary travel book. It is a brilliant account of Africa, its sights and smells, its many races, seen through the eyes of an English girl. It is also the story of the education of innocence, a deeply honest self-portrait of Christina Dodwell’s reactions to herself in Africa—and how Africa changed her.

    It also illuminates the way in which their work has changed our visual attitudes, our taste in landscape and our relation to nature.