The Beats: A Short Introduction David Sterritt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.David Sterritt teaches film at Columbia University. His The Beats is a volume in the Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions series. These slim books are small enough to be slipped into a pocket, and cover hundreds of topics, ranging alphabetically from advertising to writing and script. Sterritt's very short introduction to the Beats is not a mere outline or a puffed up encyclopedia article. He offers a concise but illuminating commentary on the Beat movement. He explores its origins and its effects, providing a rich historical context that reaches back to the American literary renaissance of the 1920s and moves forward to the present day. In doing so, Sterritt convincingly argues that the Beat writers made important contributions to twentieth-century literature.The Beats continued a rich tradition of cultural criticism in American writing. For the most part eschewing overtly political commentary, they focused on the struggle of the individual to find autonomy and redemption in modern mass society. The Beats were the heirs of the literary lost generation that flourished in the years following World War One. The war uprooted the lost generation from the comfortable moral certainties of their parents' Victorian world. In their books, they explored the bleak existential landscape of the new modernist universe. The Beats grew up during the Depression years. World War Two was a formative experience, though the closest that any of them got to the battlefields of the conflict was Jack Kerouac's brief service in the merchant marine. What the trenches were for the lost generation, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were for the Beats. They came of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb. The moral dislocation expressed by the early modernist writers seemed to be confirmed by a world locked into Cold War and threatened with nuclear annihilation. The prosperity of the late 1940s and 1950s was no more a comfort to the Beats than that of the 1920s had been for the lost generation. The Beats rejected the comfortable verities that were promoted in 1950s America. Their works expressed disdain for consumerism and an increasingly corporate culture. They celebrated loners, oddballs, and the marginalized. Perhaps naively, they assumed that authentic insight into life could be grasped by immersing themselves in a frantic bohemia, or grooving to cool jazz, or living amongst the voiceless fellahin of the world. …