Angelheaded hipsters will make you want to cry

The New York Times Book Review took a look at he recently released collection of Beatnik correspondence, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, and found that it revealed how these most beloved hipsters were indispensible to each other throughout their careers. Whether critiquing one another's work or writing loopy, drug-fueled insights about Buddhism, the NYT found that this compilation of letters offers a unique glimpse into the consciousness of their time:

But in the beginning Kerouac’s only claque consisted of his fellow hipsters — among them William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso and especially Ginsberg, who offered himself as an adoring little brother. It becomes clear while reading “Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters” that, to a remarkable degree, each was dependent on the other for encouragement and advice, and it’s rather astonishing how well founded their mutual regard proved to be. Even before Ginsberg published his masterpiece, “Howl” (1956), Kerouac had predicted that someday his friend would be a “Jewish National Hero”: “Ginsberg will be the name, like Einstein in Science, that the Jews will bring up when they claim pride in Poetry.” And lo, it came to pass. Indeed, the only writer for whom Kerouac had greater expectations was himself, and Ginsberg would learn the hard way that it was best to concur in this. “It’s late for me to say it but I see how much better you are than I,” he wrote Kerouac in 1955, two and a half years after he’d rashly ventured to suggest that a draft of “On the Road”(which Kerouac had likened to “Ulysses”) was “crazy” but “salvageable . . .