• North Beach cafés and bars where Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, Joanne Kyger, Philip Lamantia, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, David Meltzer, Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, & Ruth Weiss wrote, prophesied, and first performed poetry to jazz.
• The flat where Ginsberg wrote his seminal poem "Howl," the sites of the Sic Gallery reading and the "Howl" trial, which set new precedents for freedom of literary expression.
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti's homes and the locales of many of his poems. The Russian Hill bungalow shared by Neal and Carolyn Cassady and Jack Kerouac. The Haight-Ashbury apartments of Joanna and Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth, Diane di Prima, and Philip Whalen.
  
• Fillmore jazz clubs and later rock venues, bohemian pads and bars in Polk Gulch and the Mission. The waterfront, the transient hotels, and the ghostly railroad yards immortalized in Kerouac's "October in the Railroad Earth" and Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra."
  
• Tours east, south and north of the city take you to Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg's Berkeley cottages, to Ken Kesey's La Honda Merry Prankster house, to Sausalito, Mt. Tam, and San Quentin prison.
  

"If any city deserves the title of home of the Beat Generation," writes Bill Morgan, "it is San Francisco. While New York can rightly boast to be the birthplace of the Beats, the literary group came to maturity and literary prominence in this most beautiful city by the bay." This guide is packed with fabulous photographs and scintillating anecdotes that take you to the places where the Beats lived and loved and wrote books that changed American literature and culture. Based on in-depth interviews, it chronicles the West Coast Beat Experience beginning in the late forties, when the first set foot in the City.

Each tour includes a map of the neighborhood, and the clear instructions to help find your way. The insider's guide to Ferlinghetti's San Francisco is a must for Beat enthusiasts and scholars.

Bill Morgan is a painter and archival consultant working in New York City. He is the author of The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac's City and other literary guide books, as well as masterful descriptive bibliographies.