Although Robert Duncan figured prominently in the literary ferment of the mid-1950s in San Francisco, his literary career by no means begins or ends there. His relationship to the Bay Area writing scene originates in the late 1930s when, as coeditor of the Experimental Review with Sanders Russell, he introduced California writers like William Everson, Robert Horan, and Aurora Bligh (Mary Fabilli) to an East Coast literary scene whose prominent figures were Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, and Lawrence Durrell. In the mid-1940s he became part of a group around Kenneth Rexroth which included Everson and Philip Lamantia, and in the late 1940s, Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser formed the nucleus of a Berkeley renaissance. During the heyday of the Beats in the 1950s Duncan maintained distance from the more public postures of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso, but his works could...