the New York years : a memoir
- Categories
- Book/Boek
- Creator
- Prima, Diane di
- Publish Year
- 2001
- Shelfmark
- B1719 - B
- Thesaurus
- dichters, schrijvers, uitgevers, subculturen, popmuziek, Verenigde Staten, 1950-1959, 1960-1969, 20e eeuw, autobiografie
- Description
- Di Prima, perhaps the best known and certainly among the most talented of the beat generation poets, captures the atmosphere of New York's avant-garde community in the 1950s and 1960s, while rendering her own life. Born in Brooklyn in the mid-1930s, she remembers a loving grandmother and abusive parents. In elementary school, di Prima was bullied relentlessly: it was not until she entered Hunter High School for gifted students that she found a circle of friends: there, reading the great poets, she resolved to become a poet herself. Leaving Swarthmore College after what she perceived as unproductive years, di Prima returned to New York City, and embarked on an independent life as a writer. She describes her bohemian lifestyle love affairs with men and women, experiments with drugs with honesty and wit. Friend to many of the best known figures of the beat world, including Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde and LeRoi Jones, di Prima found fulfillment in her work as an editor and poet, and as a single mother.