Perhaps no literary/cultural movement has been as relentlessly self-documenting as the Beats, whose faces and friendships, lives and lifestyles, have been portrayed in movies and photographs, paintings and pencil sketches, memoirs, poems, and romans à clef. Yet, as the beatniks metamorphosed into hippies and the Beat Generation became the counterculture, as jazz gave way to rock, there was probably no one on the scene who observed and recorded it as affectionately, precisely, and creatively as has Edward Sanders in the thirty-two interconnected stories published as volumes one and two of Tales of Beatnik Glory (1975 and 1990).

Raised as "a regular American by Stevensonian Democrats," James Edward Sanders was perhaps an unlikely candidate for future Beat glory, growing up in a suburb of Kansas City, where he studied piano and drums and belonged to the DeMolays and the Society of Barbershop Quartet Singers. The son of Lyle David Sanders...