Other Fellow Travelers Part One Summary

By the late 1950s and 1960s, Beat came to mean anyone who is counterculture, so many people who were not part of the original Beat groups come to be associated with them. Some of these writers and artists found a greater sense of community after reading Ginsberg's "Howl." Two of these writers, Diane DiPrima and LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), found "Floating Bear," which is a literary newsletter. The newsletter is once seized for obscenity charges, but Jones succeeds in getting the charges dropped by reading other formerly banned works like "Ulysses" to the grand jury.

Amiri Baraka is a writer from Newark, New Jersey who in the 1960s embraces Islam and black nationalism. Baraka describes the experience of listening to radio shows as a small child in "In Memory of Radio." In...