Happiness Bastard
Kirby Doyle
October 12, 2020
ISBN 9780578732039 / Paperback / 224 pages / $15.99

The only published novel by West Coast Beat poet Kirby Doyle (1932–2003), written during a 1959–1960 sojourn in New York with "my lover, post-wife," as Doyle described it. First published in 1968 by Essex House, the novel captures a distinct facet of Beat literature that is shaped by the tension between West Coast sensibility and New York immediacy.

"A brutal work of black humor born of Doyle's own struggle with poverty, drug addiction, and unhappy love affairs. . . . One of the great lost novels of the Beat Generation."
— Raymond Foye

"The most important innovative breakthrough in wordcraft since Howl, Naked Lunch, The Free-Lance Pallbearers by Ishmael Reed, Informed Sources by Willard Bain and Mailer's Why Are We In Vietnam? . . . Read Happiness Bastard by Kirby Doyle. Then, if you still don't know where it's at, the hell with you."
— Lawrence Lipton, Los Angeles Free Press