Abbie Hoffman was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1936 into a Jewish middle-class family. Hoffman already won a reputation as a prankster and troublemaker at high school, from which was expelled in his second year. His first arrest followed at the age of 17. After his expulsion from high school…
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…
This 1968 user’s guide for smokers of marihuana and hashish was Jules Deelder‘s first published book. Written under the telling moniker of Julian The Joint and illustrated by his friend and partner-in-crime Rob Peters (Youssouph Ben Houpla), this handsome guide leads the reader through an ABC…
Sinclair Beiles was born in Kampala, Uganda in 1930, the only child of Jewish South African parents of Russian descent. The family moved back to Johannesburg when young Sinclair was six years old. There he studied at Wits University before starting a wandering existence in the early 1950s. Beiles…
Les Champs Magnetiques was written long before any surrealist manifesto had been published, and is regarded as the birth of surrealism. The book is the first experiment with ‘écriture automatique’, a literary technique derived from free association in psychoanalysis. The result is an enchanting and evocative collection of prose and poetry. written as in…