Tuesday June 3rd
6.30-9pm
– author Pat Thomas with
John Oakes editor/publisher at Evergreen Review, and OR books and Travis Elborough writer, author and cultural commentator.
From the late 1950s to the mid-70s, work by contributors like Judith Malina,
Bernadette Devlin, Germaine Greer, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin,
David Amram, Amiri Baraka, Eldridge Cleaver, Julius Lester, Tim Leary, Dennis Hopper,
Jean Genet, and Jerry Rubin appeared in the countercultural magazine Evergreen Review.
Their subversive work and radical politics defined outsider literature for an entire generation.
Edited by Barney Rosset of Grove Press, Evergreen Review
was a quarterly illustrated/photography driven reflection of that genre.
For the first time ever since their original print date, full-color reproductions of the
front covers of all 100 issues of the Evergreen Review from 1957 to 1973, plus
hundreds of pages from many of the issues are reprinted exactly as they looked then –
with illustrations, photography, even the ads for other books, albums, letters to the editor. – left intact!
Along with Allen Ginsberg & Timothy Leary, Dylan & the Beatles –
Rosset created the 1960s; he shaped the culture and changed the literary landscape –
he gave writers the freedom to go against the grain, to push back against the established rules of society.
In 1957, Rosset launched a companion magazine to Grove Press – Evergreen Review.
The “San Francisco Scene” issue spearheaded the Beat Generation as a nationwide literary movement,
featuring Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg.
Pat Thomas– the PEN award-winning author of Material Wealth: The Personal Archives of Allen Ginsberg,
Listen, Whitey! The sights & sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 and Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary,
now focuses on the Evergreen Review – the most influential literary/political/avant-garde magazine of the 20th Century.
“Pat Thomas succeeds in showing his subject in new and unexpected ways…. [while other authors] have a tendency to flatten their subject.”
– The Times Literary Supplement (London)