Originally published in Verbicide issue #10

City Lights, 240 pages, paperback, $12.57

Literary geographer Bill Morgan wants to take you on tour — well, actually, nine tours — of the Beat beats of the city of San Francisco. All it takes is a copy of Morgan’s latest guidebook, The Beat Generation in San Francisco: A Literary Guidebook, a enthusiasm for the literary works of artists like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and ultimately, a means of getting to the city by the Bay.

The author of several literary guidebooks, including The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s City, Morgan has mapped out nine walking tours of the areas of San Francisco that teemed with artists and their wild artistic energy long before the Summer of Love. Beyond the considerable ground the tours literally cover, Morgan’s guidebook elucidates the cultural conditions that made the Beat phenomenon take root so naturally in San Francisco, street by street.

In his introduction to the guide, Lawrence Ferlinghetti says, “The beginning of the 1950s was a germinal moment in the birth of a new America…And [young poets and dreamers, visionaries and vagabonds and wanderers] began hitchhiking and catching freights, or driving coast to coast, discovering a new America. San Francisco was the end of the line…”

So at the end of the line, at the edge of the modern world, in a city known for its periods of renaissance, the stage was set for Frisco’s road weary pilgrims to capture the country’s new face and character on the page, on film, on the canvas, in galleries, publishing houses, streets, and bars. And it is those places—the places that brought even restless Beat wanderers off the road, where those images of the new America took form—that Morgan wants to show us.

This is a guidebook for those with whom the romance of the Beat culture still resonates. They might be able to picture what Ginsberg’s face looked like when he shouted out the lines of “Howl” for the first time in the Six Gallery (plotted on tour five); or maybe they can pick up on leftovers of the creative energies that tidal waved the city after “Howl” and its author as well as Ferlinghetti, its publisher, were legally forgiven in court for being so insistently honest (details on tour one). Morgan’s book gives directions to the places where Kerouac drank, crashed, and wrote; it details how to get to Gary Snyder’s apartment after he returned from an eight-year stint in Japan; it can take you to the Cassadys’ house on Russell Street; and so much further.

Heck, even if you don’t have too much of an interest in Beat history, Morgan’s guidebook is comprehensive enough to satisfy any visitor to San Fran keen on seeing the city’s brochure-famous places. Certainly the self-guided scenic tour the city provides marked by signs painted with smirking seagulls can accomplish nearly the same effect, but Morgan’s got the dirt, directions—including public transport suggestions—terrific, rare photos, and a passion for his subject matter that somehow maps out San Fran’s heart and soul.

Sound like fun? Good, because any good traveler should visit San Francisco and Morgan’s book is a great tool for getting to know the city.