Arthur WinfieldKnight

Arthur Winfield Knight (1937-2012) was a Beat-Generation scholar, poet, novelist, playwright, and film critic who, with his wife Kit Knight, did as much as any single American to preserve and publicize the first-generation Beats. Born in San Francisco in 1937 and raised in Petaluma, California, he taught English and Creative Writing at California University of Pennsylvania for more than thirty years before retiring west to Yerington, Nevada in 2006. He died there of liver cancer in 2012, aged 74.

With Kit Knight he edited eight volumes of Beat primary material under the unspeakable visions of the individual imprint they ran out of California, Pennsylvania from 1976 to roughly 1988, including The Beat Diary (1977), Beat Journey (1978), Beat Angels (1982), and The Beat Vision: A Primary Sourcebook (1987). The volumes gathered prose, letters, and interviews from and about Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal and Carolyn Cassady, and Gregory Corso. The Arthur and Kit Knight Beat Collection now resides at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His own work ranged widely: the play King of the Beatniks won at the Shropshire Drama Festival after being banned from competition at the All England Drama Festival in Wales, and his later novels turned to the American West and to Hollywood, among them Johnnie D. (Forge, 2000) and Misfits Country (Tres Picos, 2008).

His JEF connection runs through a single book, The Darkness Starts Up Where You Stand (Depth Charge, 1996), a novel about a woman's descent into addiction after the death of her husband. It was the first book Depth Charge Press published by someone other than Eckhard Gerdes, with cover and interior art by Persis Gerdes. That makes Knight the press's founding non-Gerdes author.

Start with The Darkness Starts Up Where You Stand, JEF's only Knight title and the book that opened the press to other writers.