Ed Sanders's career has been as colorful as his writings and as vivid as any of the characters in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which, when Sanders read it as a freshman in college, made him realize that the social and cultural revolution already underway was his own, and that he, too, was part of the Beat Generation. More important, he became part of the extension of the Beat Generation beyond its origins in post-World War II restlessness into the later politicization and activism of American youth. He helped create the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s and beyond.

Born James Edward Sanders in Kansas City, Missouri, he was his high school's class president, a member of the basketball and football teams, and the recipient of college scholarships, but it was the death of his mother, Mollie Cravens Sanders, when he was seventeen, followed by his discovery...