Rocky Mountain News: Books: Raucous times with beat poets.
Kashner arrives in Boulder ready to "eat death and live poetry" at the feet of the these Wild Men of the Fifties, who experimented with drugs, sex, sanity, and words with mad, reckless abandon. What he found were old men: in 1976, William Burroughs was 62; Ginsberg was 50; Jack Kerouac had been dead seven years. As Kashner points out, this was "the Beat Generation in a weird retirement phase."
Not that they had lost all their moxie. No sooner has Kashner settled into his student apartment, than he is enlisted in a midnight drive into the mountains with Burroughs and a few others to harvest a marijuana field the old renegades have been tending.
