Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as Homosexual in Society

Robert Duncan was the heart of the San Francisco Renaissance ― the literary and countercultural movement that prefigured Black Mountain, the Beats, and the hippies. Duncan functioned as shaman of an emerging aesthetic grounded in magic, polytheism, and sexual freedom, a role that he cultivated in weekly Berkeley literary salons. For his biographer, Ekbert Faas, the mystic-poet Duncan was a harbinger of the coming cultural revolution, the iconic “guru” figure who, in the late 1940s, pried opened the door to the late 1960s.

With 36 pages of black-&-white photographs and an Appendix collecting six early uncollected prose pieces by Robert Duncan, including "The Homosexual in Society" and "Love: A Story"
Ekbert Faas was born in Berlin in 1938 and has lived in North America since 1972. A professor of humanities at the York University, Toronto, he is the author of Towards a New American Poetics (1978), The Genealogy of Aesthetics (2002), and Robert Creeley: A Biography (2005).