Harold Norse was born Harold Rosen to a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant in 1916. After having graduated from Brooklyn College he became close friends with W.H. Auden (after the latter’s move to the USA in 1939) and William Carlos Williams, who helped publish Norse’s experimental and groundbreaking poems. In the early 1950s Norse got his master’s degree in literature from New York University and saw his first poetry compilation published. Norse lived in Italy in the second half of the 1950s and was a resident of the Beat Hotel in Paris with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso from 1959 to 1963. After having moved to the Greek island of Hydra and Tangier, Norse returned to the US in 1968. The last 35 years of his life were spent in the Mission District of San Francisco. With his ‘Carnivorous Saint: Gay Poems 1941-1976’ and publications in magazines such as Gay Sunshine, Norse established himself as one of the leading gay liberation poets of his era.
From the blurb of this edition:
On 6th July 1954, on the day of his 38th birthday, the American poet Harold Norse set off on an adventure across Italy. Best known for his contributions as a Beat poet, and later as a Gay Liberation poet, Norse travelled around Europe between 1953 and 1968, where he honed his craft as a poet and picaro. Published for the first time, Autostop! Hitching Through Italy on $2 a Day is a reminder of Norse’s skill as prose writer and raconteur, here weaving in Italian history and culture – “sketching it,” he tells us “not snapping it in black and white and Kodachrome.”
In Autostop!, the sounds, smells and eroticism of the country come alive, especially in the accounts of the people he meets in Naples, Capri, Calabria, and Sicily. “I would look at no book, consult no encyclopedia,” Norse explains, “without first consulting the peasant, the laborer, the tradesman, the professional, the aristocrat.” This is the guidebook of a poet; a “love affair,” as Norse puts it in which the country comes alive.