"While vividly evoking Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and William Burroughs, this celebrated Beat Generation biography focuses on Lew Welch, the poet who lived the American Dream as an advertising man (shades of Mad Men) before dropping out"--Barnes & Noble website.

The son and biographer of William Saroyan, one of the most acclaimed writers in American history, Aram Saroyan grew up in a world of celebrities and geniuses. His own writings soon placed him among the best known figures in the New York School of poets, and his essays and reviews helped to characterize his generation. Starting Out in the Sixties is a powerful collection of essays, memoirs, and reflections with commentary and anecdotes about publishing, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac, the author's author's Armenian heritage, his famous father, William Burroughs, and much, much more. Variously humorous, reflective, and profound, Saroyan's book should prove to be both a very popular work and, for many years to come, a key guide to the taste and literary values of the generation that started out in the sixties.

Aram Saroyan's The Street: An Autobiographical Novel tells what it was like to come of age in New York City in the turbulent period of Vietnam and L.S.D., of racial unrest and rock-and-roll. Saroyan's free-wheeling, poignant and funny autobiographical novel deals with near stardom in Hollywood (Mike Nichols wanted him for the title role in "The Graduate"), his father, William Saroyan, his step-father, Walter Matthau, and a fascinating cast of characters from the world famous to the drop-outs of the psychedelic revolution. A screen adaptation of The Street, written and directed by Noam J. Christopher, can be viewed at ubu.com/film/saroyan.html. "Here is a novel that pins down an era." -Bookpeople Aram Saroyan's Complete Minimal Poems received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His many prose books include Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation, Artists in Trouble: New Stories, and Door to the River: Essays and Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age. "A writer who looks deeply into himself and his own experience, confronts what he finds there with real courage and reports what he has experienced with a measure of candor that is both breathtaking and, at moments, heartbreaking." -Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times