Among women of her generation, Diane DiPrima is the writer who by her life and work most embodies the definable patterns of the Beat Generation. Among other things, it is she who reminds us that the generation spent as much time in urban "pads" as it did "on the road," and that one can travel as far by human relationships as by thumb. It is reported that at one point in her youth she considered becoming a theoretical physicist, but she turned her back on accepted values early and has never since felt the need to revert to them. The immediate background against which she revolted is given in her Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969): "I came from Brooklyn, from a block that just avoided being a slum, where I had played stickball and dodged the Irish altar boys. My parents were first-generation Americans, my grandparents Italian, and our...