Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant Garde

Miles Davis and Juliette Greco, Jackson Pollock and Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan and William Burroughs.
What do all these people have in common? Fame, of course, and undeniable talent. But most of all, they were cool.
Birth of the Cool is a stunningly illustrated, brilliantly written cultural history of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s -- the decades in which cool was born. From intimate interviews with cool icons like poet Allen Ginsberg, bop saxopho…