Evergreen Review: Dispatches from the Literary Underground: Covers & Essays 1957-1973

by Pat Thomas (Editor)

Overview

The magazine of the Beat Generation returns in this awe-inspiring compilation of the art, essays and photography of the avant-garde Evergreen Review.

From the late 1950s to the mid-70s, work by contributors like Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Eldridge Cleaver, Tim Leary, Dennis Hopper, Jean Genet, Jerry Rubin, Bernadette Devlin, and Germaine Greer regularly appeared in the countercultural magazine Evergreen Review. Their subversive work and radical politics defined outsider literature for an entire generation. Edited by Barney Rosset of Grove Press, Evergreen Review was a quarterly illustrated/photography driven reflection of that genre.

For the first time ever since their original print date, 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 are reprinted exactly as they looked then – with all illustrations, photography, even the ads for other books, albums, letters to the editor, subscription offers, etc. – left intact!

Historian Pat Thomas interviewed original 1960s era Evergreen staffers to get the inside scoop on the day-to-day operation of the magazine, and those conversations join new essays looking back on this golden era by John Oakes, Loren Glass, Kasia Boddy, Dale Peck, Ethan Persoff, Ken Jordan and Stanley Gontarski. Will this new Evergreen Review change the world as it did in the 1960s? Of course it will!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798875000676
Publisher:	Fantagraphics
Publication date:	08/19/2025
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 12.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Pat Thomas is the author of Listen, Whitey! The Sights & Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975, Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary, and co-editor of Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980. In co-operation with the Estate of Allen Ginsberg, Thomas edited the visual tome Material Wealth: The Personal Archives of Allen Ginsberg, with a forward by poet Anne Waldman, which won a PEN award in 2024. Thomas was the co-editor of Ernie in Kovacsland: Drawings, and Photographs from Television's Original Genius and Grievous Angels, Trout Masks, and American Beauties: 1970s Rock & Roll Photography of Ginny Winn with an introduction by Maria Muldaur. He lives on America’s left coast.

Editorial Reviews

"Thomas’s writing combines a true fan’s enthusiasm and curiosity with an aficionado’s deep knowledge of music, politics and pop culture, not to mention the kind of intellectual’s wiseass skepticism that would have made Lester Bangs a kindred spirit."

Rex Weiner

"With Evergreen Review, Pat Thomas has done an admirable job of not only capturing the essence of the publication and its free-wheeling ‘60s 'anything goes' vibe, but also offers a final argument for the magazine’s status as one of the most important cultural institutions of the era. It’s also a stunning book, visually."

Book and Film Globe

"[His] book is meticulously detailed, reflecting Thomas's skills as a researcher (and record producer), yet conversational in tone, balancing the voice of a rock critic with the heft of a historian."

Salon

"Pat Thomas succeeds in showing his subject in new and unexpected ways…. [other authors] have a tendency to flatten their subject."

The Times Literary Supplement (London)

★ 2025-03-08
A lively anthology of an archly contrarian, occasionally semi-pornographic, and highly influential magazine over its three decades.

Editor Thomas, a learned student of all things ’60s, makes a strong case for Barney Rosset and hisEvergreen Review as key agents of the era’s evolving culture, politics, media, and entertainment: “Barney has not been properly acknowledged for morphing the sociopolitical terrain of the 1960s and early 70s. Along with the folks like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, Barney Rosset created the 1960s.” The 1957 debut issue was suggestive of that era-shaping mission: It contained an excerpt from Ginsberg’s new poemHowl, a piece by Ralph Gleason on San Francisco jazz, a prose piece by the pre–On the Road Jack Kerouac, and works by many other Beat luminaries. Suggestive, too, was the fact that Cuban nationalists, put out by the review’s glorification of Fidel and Che, fired an RPG into Rosset’s Grove Press office, an act that “eloquently testified to Rosset’s capacity to provoke American sensibilities.” Thomas’ anthology hits on many high points, including an essay by Brion Gysin explaining his cut-up method of composition; Norman Mailer’s testimony at the Boston obscenity trial of William Burroughs’sNaked Lunch; and even the American debut of the French cartoonBarbarella, soon to be a major motion picture. It was in Rosset’s pages that Ezra Pound lamented to Ginsberg his “stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism,” that Dennis Hopper detailed how the iconic filmEasy Rider came to be, and that Twiggy revealed…well, more than readers had seen before, anyway. Jorge Luis Borges, Kay Boyle, Eldridge Cleaver, Bernadette Devlin: Every issue (and Thomas reproduces the covers of all of them) was a trove for readers, political activists, and fans of popular culture then and now.

An enjoyable and illuminating stroll down a countercultural memory lane.

Kirkus Reviews