Ed Sanders's mock-heroic (and heroic) odyssey follows poet, filmmaker, and activist Sam Thomas, editor of Dope, Fucking, and Social Change, and a variegated cast of castoffs, dropouts, peaceniks, freakniks, and mendicant filthniks, from Kansas through the beatnik and hippie countercultures of New York City's Lower East Side and Greenwich Village. From the Freedom Rides and confrontations with the Alabama Klan to the "hate-dappled" Summer of Love, Tales of Beatnik Glory is the epic of America in the sixties, in a language of droll invention and stoned mythopoesis, from a man who once dared to exorcise the Pentagon.