The Boston Globe has described David Amram as "the Renaissance man of American music." Amram and Jack Kerouac collaborated on the first-ever Jazz poetry reading in New York City in 1957 as well as the subsequent legendary film "Pull My Daisy" in 1959, which combined Amram's jazz and chamber music and Kerouac's narration. Not only part of what came to be known as the Beat generation, Amram has also composed over 100 orchestral and chamber works, written two operas, and has collaborated with such notables as Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, Dustin Hoffman, Thelonius Monk, Willie Nelson, Betty Carter, Odetta, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, and Tito Puente. This edition includes a new introduction by the author and a new foreword by Douglas Brinkley