Kerouac

The only people for me are the mad ones,
the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk,
mad to be saved, desirous of everything at
the same time, the ones who never yawn or
say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn,
burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars...

The Group

Excerpt from Mary McCarthy's The Group:

"You and your social friends," he continued, "have a finer functional adaption. Full, low-slung breasts" -he stared about the room- "fashioned to carry pearls and boucle sweaters and faggoting and tucked crepe de Chine blouses. Narrow waists. Tapering legs. As a man of the last decade, I prefer the boyish figure myself: a girl in a bathing cap poised to jackknife on a diving board. Marblehead summer memories; Betty is a marvelous swimmer. Thin women are more sensual; scientific fact- the nerve ends are closer to the surface." His grey eyes narrowed, heavy-lidded, as though he were drifting off to sleep. "I like the fat one, though," he said abruptly, singling out Pokey Prothero. "She has a thermal look. Nacreous skin, plumped with oysters. Yum, yum, yum; money, money. My sexual problems are economic. I loathe under-privileged women, but my own outlook is bohemian. Impossible combination."

Two of a Kind, They Met

Two of a kind, they met in the vast array of the non-fiction aisle. Only Dorothy Parker was to blame, for she drew them close, magnetized and confounded. Why would anyone else want to read Laments for the Living? How utterly peculiar. They thought their weirdness strictly a solitary quality -not shared with an attractive other. Once she spied the romance and he the comics, each literary taste went wayward.