(1939–)

(Full name James Edward Sanders) American poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, nonfiction writer, short story writer, and songwriter.

Widely known as an activist, writer, and musician, Sanders gained recognition with his poetry magazine Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, which published works from a variety of major Beat authors including Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. He also is known for his nonfiction work The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (1971), an account of serial murderer Charles Manson and his followers, as well as for founding the folk-rock band the Fugs. Combining a militant radicalism with a satirical disregard for the restrictions placed upon cultural expression, Sanders’s works denounce conventional morality and government repression while celebrating physical and spiritual liberation and altered states of consciousness. Compared by some critics to such poets as William Blake, Walt Whitman, and...