VIA PRESS RELEASE | “Evergreen Review was a touchstone of alternative publishing during the sixties and seventies, a veritable bible of progressive politics, culture, art, cartoons and photography. It was a launchpad for opinion, commentary, journalism and literature and the old and new left. Pat Thomas has assembled an invaluable oral history and collection of the best of Evergreen from that critical era when revolutionary writers and artists challenged the status quo.” —Steven Heller/art director of Evergreen Review (circa 1972)
For the first time ever since their original print date, this book presents full color reproductions of all front covers of all 100 issues of the Evergreen Review from 1957 to 1973, plus hundreds of pages from many of the issues reprinted exactly as they originally appeared—all illustrations, photography, even the ads for other books, albums, letters to the editor, subscription offers, etc.—left intact!
Historian Pat Thomas interviewed 1960s era Evergreen staffers to get the inside scoop on the day-to-day operation of the magazine, plus gathered new essays looking back on this golden era by John Oakes, Loren Glass, Kasia Boddy, Dale Peck, Ethan Persoff, Ken Jordan, and Stanley Gontarski. A book tour will be confirmed shortly in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston and London with additional dates added & announced shortly. Advance PDF review copies available by request.
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.
In 1951, Barney Rosset—via his Grove Press—began publishing books by Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Jack Kerouac (The Subterraneans), William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Alex Haley (The Autobiography of Malcolm X), and Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer). Along with Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, Dylan and 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. Over the next few years, Albert Camus, Frank O’Hara, William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, Terry Southern, Jean-Paul Sartre, Larry Rivers, Julian Beck, Norman Mailer, Antonin Artaud, Günter Grass, Richard Brautigan, Chester Himes, Nat Hentoff, along with others would appear in the Evergreen Review.
The magazine embraced all the sociopolitical movements: Anti-Vietnam War, Hippies and Yippies, Black Panthers/Black Power, music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air. From the late 1950s to mid-’70s, Evergreen Review was the definitive source of Beat Generation, subversive, countercultural, and radical/political literature—a quarterly illustrated/photography-driven reflection of those genres—featuring contributions from Amiri Baraka, Eldridge Cleaver, Tim Leary, Dennis Hopper, Jean Genet, Jerry Rubin, Bernadette Devlin, Germaine Greer, et al.
