Pat Thomas in conversation with Steve Wasserman
City Lights celebrates the publication of
Evergreen Review: Dispatches from the Literary Underground: Covers & Essays 1957-1973
Complied by Pat Thomas
Published by Fantagraphics
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!
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.
Steve Wasserman is publisher of Heyday Books. A 1974 graduate of UC Berkeley, he holds a degree in criminology. His past positions include being deputy editor of the op-ed page and opinion section of the Los Angeles Times; editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review; editorial director of New Republic Books; publisher and editorial director of Hill and Wang at Farrar, Straus & Giroux and of the Noonday Press; editorial director of Times Books at Random House; and editor at large for Yale University Press. A former partner of the literacy agency Kneerim & Williams, he represented many authors, including Christopher Hitchens, Linda Ronstadt, Robert Scheer, and David Thomson. His most recent book is Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays. He lives in Berkeley, California.
Praise for Evergreen Review: Dispatches from the Literary Underground
“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)
“[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
“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, author of The Woodstock Census
This event is made possible by the support of the City Lights Foundation