Containing more than a hundred poems, accompanied by original photographs, and spanning from the 1940s to the 1990s, this book focuses on the sprawling oeuvre.

In The Best Minds of My Generation Ginsberg gives us the convoluted origin story of the 'Beat' idea. Amongst anecdotes of meeting Kerouac, Burroughs and other figures for the first time, Ginsberg elucidates the importance of music, and particularly jazz rhythms, to Beat writing, discusses their many influences and paints a portrait of a group who were leading a literary revolution.