Art & Seek’s Jerome Weeks was the guest host for Think today — filling in for regular host Krys Boyd who’s on vacation. He talked with Beat historian and editor Bill Morgan, author of the new book, The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation. In his book, Morgan argues that the one thing that truly unites the disparate group of some two dozen writers and artists known as the Beats is friendship with Alan Ginsberg — who encouraged many to become writers, kept in contact with all of them, got some of them published. He makes a case for a social history of the Beats instead of a literary one.

We start with Morgan’s starting point: The Beats began because several of them — Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Alan Ginsberg — were indirectly involved with a murder.