Beat Literature Research Guide

This is a collection of online encyclopedias which you can search all at once. Its strength is in helping to establish a background, from which you can more easily search for additional information elsewhere. For instance, you could search for Beats and Buddhism to learn more about the influence of Eastern religion on the Beat generation, and perhaps learn some names or vocabulary (for instance: Snyder, or Zen) which you could use in other searches. Also, be sure to check the bibliographies for additional works.

Biography is a useful tool when studying the Beat generation. The DLB is a digitized book series which provides short, critical biographies of important literary figures. It also includes an entire volume on the Beats, which you will certainly find if you search.

Many of the Beats were poets, and individual poems are often difficult to search in MLA. Instead, I'd recommend using the Person--About search. If you are interested in relationships between authors, try searching both of them at once!

Humanities Source covers not only literature, but also history, art, and drama. This makes it a good place to search for materials you may not always find in MLA,; for instance, there is a lot of American Studies material on the Beats here.

Full-text, multidisciplinary database, with no indexing. This means that you have to be careful that you match your search with the words used in the articles you are searching, and that you need to winnow out those which merely mention your topic of interest without discussing them in any detail. However, because this is a different kind of search, it sometimes turns up other materials, especially if you are searching for a particular phrase.

Much like JSTOR, this is a full-text, multidisciplinary database.

Includes literary criticism, biographies, overviews, and reviews.