Kenneth Patchen was a part of the air the Beats breathed. By the time they arrived in the San Francisco area in the mid-1950s, he was already there as an elder statesman of the American avant-garde. Born 13 December 1911 to Wayne and Eva Patchen, he was the third of five children in a Scottish and Irish family. Descendant from a proletarian family of coal miners and steel workers in the industrial Ohio Valley of Niles, Ohio, he became active in both sports and writing at Warren G. Harding High School, from which he graduated in 1928. That same summer he gained his first experience as a laborer in the steel mills. On a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, he participated in the Alexander Meikeljohn's Experimental College in 1929 and followed his mentor Meikeljohn the following year to Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas. There followed a period of Whitmanesque traveling...