Since that day I have opened many books, but no economic argument, no lucid demonstration of the logic and inevitableness of Socialism affects me as profoundly and convincingly as I was affected on the day when I first saw the walls of the Social Pit rise around me and felt myself slipping down, down, into the shambles at the bottom. Because I started in young, I practically skipped my gay-cat apprenticeship. Ann Douglas writes that the friends who hit the road "interpreted the word "Beat" differently-Ginsberg and Kerouac said it meant exhausted, poor, beatific, while Burroughs, a master ironist, used it as a verb, meaning to steal or con" (6). ...perhaps for "the Beats" the main thing held in common was being on the edges of a newly industrialized post-war landscape that was supposed to provide opportunity, especially in the mystical West. Again the power of redemption is shown as fire, the sun, the light of Christ, the glowing of the stars that light the night instead of only all the blank spaces between them. ...the father's authorship of the boy, telling the story of good people, patiently, but strongly, over and over and over again, does make the story of their lives work and also the novel.