About the Author:
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS (1914 1997), one of this century s most influential writers and a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters, was the author of numerous books, including Naked Lunch, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, and The Wild Boys. JACK KEROUAC (1922 1969) was one of the most inventive writers of the twentieth century and is considered the father of the Beat Generation. He was the author of On the Road, The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and many other books.
Review:
A combination hard-boiled murder mystery and existentialist lament on the meaninglessness of modern life think Dashiell Hammett meets Albert Camus. ... an essential document of the Beat Generation filled with precise details and precisely recorded dialogue from a place and period, pre-Atomic Age America, now almost irretrievably lost to us. But Hippos is more than just a debunking of the standard histories of the period. It contains the first clear expression of the core Beat vision of America as insane and morally corrupt a vision as apt and accurate today as it was when these outcasts and marginal outlaws began to emerge from their societal exile some 60 years ago. --San Francisco Chronicle
In alternating chapters, Burroughs and Kerouac serve up a noir vision of Manhattan... Of the two, Kerouac, then in his early 20s, is the more developed writer, though Burroughs, an absolute beginner, already shows some of the interests and obsessions that will turn up in Naked Lunch and elsewhere, to say nothing of an obviously field-tested understanding of how syringes work....For his part, Kerouac recounts wartime experiences in the Merchant Marine, along with notes on the bar scene that would do Bukowski proud. --Kirkus Reviews
Reveal[s] two giants-to-be in the development stages of their craft....With its evocative rendition of now-vanished saloons, bygone diners, and other landmarks of yesteryear, Burroughs and Kerouac may have inadvertently done for 1944 Greenwich Village what Joyce did for 1904 Dublin. Phoenix (Boston) The appearance in print of And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac is a literary event, not only because it drew two of the three leading Beat writers into confederacy, but because the book told a story of male friendship, gay obsession, and murder that came to fascinate a score of American authors....It s a fascinating snapshot from a lost era. If you re looking for the link between Hemingway s impotent post-war drifters in The Sun Also Rises, the barflies and Tralalas of Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the zonked-out kids of Bret Easton Ellis s Less Than Zero, look no further. Independent --(sources listed)
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