(1911–1972)

American novelist, poet, and playwright.

An archetypal rebel poet, Patchen wrote angry, uncompromising, anti-war poetry, experimented with the form of the novel, attempted to merge poetry with graphics and jazz, and even disparaged the Beat movement, which sought to embrace him. As an elder statesman of the American avant-garde and author of a large body of work reaching back to the 1930s, Patchen was an inspiration and groundbreaker for numerous Beat poets emerging in the 1950s. In his most celebrated work, the anti-war novel (some call this work an “anti-novel”) The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941), he portrays the world as a hell, its inhabitants mad with heartless capitalism and the urge to kill. In this and many other works, Patchen used a free-form, stream-of-consciousness style that confounded attempts at classification and sharply divided critics of his works into two camps—admirers and...