Daniel Radcliffe's new movie, "Kill Your Darlings," now in theaters, tells the story of the 1944 murder of David Kammerer by early Beat icon Lucien Carr, and the crystallization of the group’s bond around the sordid tragedy. By its nature, Beat writing was heavily autobiographical, blurring fiction, memoir, and mythmaking. Here, we present a range of versions of the lives of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and their friends, lovers, and acolytes, which explore how, why, and at what personal cost the Beats became countercultural legends.

The Beat Book, edited by poet Anne Waldman, offers a rich overview of Beat literature. Excerpts from classic works and lesser-known pieces are interspersed with biographies of the main figures, illuminated by Waldman’s position as a longtime friend of many in the movement. She includes an extensive bibliography of Beat writing and a travel guide to “Beat places” around the world, where the writers lived and worked, for any readers inspired to go on the road themselves.

Dennis McNally’s Desolate Angel puts the life of Jack Kerouac, "King of the Beats,” into its wider context as a way of understanding the revolutions within American culture from the 1940s to the 1970s. McNally brings out the contradictions in Kerouac, a sportsman who was also a poet, a writer who encountered critical snobbery but ignited the passions of young fans, and a spiritual seeker who embraced Catholicism and Buddhism. McNally’s sympathetic biography follows Kerouac from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Columbia University and his life-altering friendship with Ginsberg, through his battles with alcoholism and restless, lifelong pursuit of creative freedom.

Ann Charters’ Kerouac: A Biography was one of the first to recognize the writer’s impact on American letters, and was written with the writer’s support and collaboration late in his life. Charters, an early Beat fan who became a professor of American literature, blends a thoughtful, scholarly reading of Kerouac’s works and methods -- especially his vision of the compromised innocence of America -- with an atmospheric evocation of the man himself. Includes a foreword by Allen Ginsberg.

Joyce Johnson’s The Voice Is All won critical praise for its innovative approach to Kerouac’s life through his multi-layered use of language and the importance of his French Canadian heritage in shaping his voice and his relationship to America. Johnson previously wrote about her relationship with the Beats and Kerouac in her memoir Minor Characters, which won the 1983 National Book Critics’ Circle prize for autobiography, and has published a collection of her correspondence with Kerouac. As a novelist herself, Johnson crafts nonfiction writing that is an elegant treat.

In Off the Road, another woman who played a central role in the Beat universe tells her version of the story, focusing on the real man behind Kerouac’s immortal Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Carolyn Cassady was married to Neal, the inspiration behind Dean, and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg’s and a lover of Kerouac’s. An intimate witness to the major achievements and turbulent friendships of these three central figures, Cassady creates in her book a revealing and thrilling group portrait, and a testament to the appeal of rebellion.

Allen Ginsberg’s archivist Bill Morgan draws on a wealth of material to create a rich and riveting biography of the poet in I Celebrate Myself. These materials include Ginsberg’s revealing unpublished journals, which offer a revealing portrait of the developing artist, and shed light on his relationships with other Beat writers and with Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. Morgan also explores Ginsberg’s spiritual beliefs, his Buddhism, and the way that these affected his uniquely energetic embrace of life.

Bill Morgan is also the author of the wider-ranging study The Typewriter Is Holy, which takes its title from Ginsberg’s footnote to Howl. Not surprisingly, Morgan places Ginsberg at the center of the riotous company of the Beats and their fellow travelers, and gives a vivid account of their cultural impact, especially on the emerging 1960s social movements. His is no hagiography, however -- the book is also clear-eyed about the limitations of vision of a group that was primarily male and entirely white, and too often driven to self-destruction rather than revolution.

Ted Morgan -- no relation to Bill -- is the author of the only full biography of William S. Burroughs, perhaps the most reliably anarchic member of the Beat circle. The two met in Tangier in 1968 and became friends, although Burroughs would eventually hate the book that he asked Morgan to write. Readers, however, will find plenty to relish in this unfiltered story, marked by violence, excess, and ferocious energy. With a new preface and final chapter on Burroughs’ final years, Pulitzer-winning journalist Morgan captures the spirit of this literary renegade without turning him into a hero, or a caricature.