"If any city in America deserves the title of home of the Beat Generation," writes Bill Morgan, "it is San Francisco. While New York can rightly boast to be the birthplace of the Beats, the literary group came to maturity and literary prominence in the most beautiful city by the bay." This guide is packed with fabulous photographs and scintillating anecdotes that take you to the places where the Beats lived and loved and wrote books that changed American literature and culture. Based on in-depth interviews, it chronicles the West Coast Beat experience beginning in the late forties, when they frist set foot in the City.