A Discourse on Hip: selected writings of Milton Klonsky

Milton Klonsky, drawn to Greenwich Village in 1945, immersed himself in its heady mix of postwar American rawness, Bohemian libido, and European dialectics. He was an avid reader and an inspired talker who was able to hold his own in fast intellectual company, and was, if anything, fast intellectual company himself.

Editor Ted Solotaroff selected from among Klonsky's published works for this volume. Some testify to Klonsky's kaleidoscopic mind, capable of arranging the bits and pieces of his eclectic learning into novel and sometimes astonishing patterns. His essays on the Village exhibit a painter's sensitivity to color and line and an eye for the strange amid the familiar. Though the details and examples of his essays on mass culture are dated, the ideas behind them have gone from being appropriate to their own time to being prophetic of our own. Some inclusions are clearly autobiographical, reflections on his youth and Jewish heritage.

In the fifties as many of the Village's intellectuals moved up town or out of town, Klonsky remained. Mark Shechner, in his introduction, notes that Klonsky "never left the Village and never gave up on the spirit of the Village as he first encountered it in his youth. . . . He was first and foremost a Village intellectual, meaning that not only did he remain in the Village all his life, but that he was quintessentially of it as well.

A Discourse on Hip: Selected Essays of Milton Klonsky presents today's readers with the opportunity to begin or renew their appreciation for Klonsky's writing and uncompromising vision.