Many readers view Bob Kaufman as the unsung patriarch of the Beat poetry movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Although somewhat neglected critically in America, his work is not unknown and appears in more than thirty anthologies. Major white poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, as well as Beat-turned-black-nationalist-poet Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) enthusiastically took their cues from Kaufman's innovations. However, they have not been as quick in recognizing his influence. Kaufman's poems were instrumental in spreading the values and existentialist bohemian life-style of the Beat generation throughout Europe, where his work has been well received, and, eventually, throughout the United States.

Bob Kaufman was born in New Orleans to an Orthodox Jewish German father and a devout Catholic mother, descendant of a woman who was brought to America on an African slave ship. He was the eleventh of thirteen brothers and...