John Tytell

John Tytell (b. 1939) is an American writer, whose works on such literary figures including, Jack Kerouac, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs, have made him both a leading scholar of the Beat Generation, and a respected name in literature in general.

Biography

Tytell was born on May 17, 1939, in Antwerp, Belgium. As part of an affluent diamond trading family of Jewish descent who fled to America to escape Nazi oppression, Tytell grew up in New York city where he has lived for the majority of his life. Afflicted with "vernal catarrh" till the age of 12, Tytell was confined to low-lit rooms by his eye's sensitivity, and the seeping fluids plaguing him during waking hours. This condition prevented him from seriously taking part in the family's diamond trade where precision was a must, but it helped to introduce him to a world of reading.

As Tytell would later write about this time period in his book "Reading New York", literature was both an escape from the gloom of his darkened bedroom, as well as a subversive act of defiance, because he was forbidden to read for fear that the strain would further damage his eyes. Tytell read Melville and Poe at this early age, and the sense of a great American literary foundation seems to have influenced his later work on the Beats, who were extensions of these 19th century giants, whose prose and poetry defined their century, as the Beats would later shape the 20th century course of American Literature.

The impetus for the book "Naked Angels" was a paper that Tytell presented at "That Last Lecture Series" held by Queens College, entitled: "The Beat Generation and the Continuing American Revolution". In terms of an advancement for the study of the Beats, the event might have been better titled, the "First"'Lecture Series.fact|date=May 2008

Quotations

"What was much more difficult was the fact of my own conditioning: the years of reading more classical forms of expression, which had helped to form my taste as well as that of the Western world, and an academic process that reveres the past while almost always condescending to the present. It is easier to idealize the dead; the living can be querulous." [Tytell, John. "Paradise Outlaws", William Morrow, 1999. page 23]

"Burroughs has been our most apocalyptic American writer since Edgar Allan Poe. Marshall McLuhan, reviewing "Naked Lunch" in "The Nation", observed that criticizing Burroughs was very much like finding fault with the demeanor or dress of the man who was banging on your kitchen door to warn you that your house was on fire. It still seems an apt simile." [Tytell, John. "Paradise Outlaws", William Morrow, 1999. page 114]

References