Before the beats had become the Beats-that occurred later on in the 1950s, after the publication of On the Road-John Clellon Holmes charted in Go their manic exploration of the unconscious, their feverish quest for experience, their glorification of crime. It was he who introduced that generation-and in collaboration with Jack Kerouac, the term that would define it: The Beat Generation. Upon re-reading Go in 1976, 24 years after its first publication, Holmes had fleeting doubts about the truth of what he had written. "Did we really resemble these feverish young men, these centerless young women, awkwardly reaching out for love, for hope, for comprehension of their lives & times?" he writes in the introduction. "Can this picture of the New York of twenty-five year ago be accurate? I can attest that it is. These were the places we live in , the events that occurred, the way we talked, & the things we talked about. In this sense, the book is almost literal truth, sometimes a truth too literal to be poetically true, which is the only truth that matters in literature." Go is an insider's look at the coming of age of the Beat Generation.