In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. One of their friends, Lucien Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerrer, whose sexual advances he'd seemingly grown tired of rejecting. Carr, still in bloodstained clothes, had come to each of them and confessed; Kerouac helped him get rid of the weapon - neither told the police. For this failing they were arrested. Months later the two writers - unpublished at the time - collaborated on "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks", a fictionalized account of the summer of the killing. They wrote alternating chapters - Burroughs writing as sometime bartender and workaday detective Will Dennison, Kerouac as Mike Ryko, an Irish merchant seaman.From this intensely personal material they made a hard-boiled account of a group of friends moving through each other's apartments, killing time drinking, necking, talking and taking drugs, and haphazardly drifting towards a bloody crime - flabby, likeable Ramsey Allen trailing after the beautiful Phillip Tourian, constantly angering him with his endless desire to please. Unpublished until now, this is a kind of crime novel of humans stewing in their inactivity, and a remarkable insight into the lives and literary development of two great writers.

杰克•凯鲁亚克（Jack Kerouac，1922-1969），是美国“垮掉的一代”代表人物。他的主要作品有自传体小说《在路上》等。他以离经叛道、惊世骇俗的生活方式与文学主张，震撼了20世纪五六十年代美国主流文化的价值观与社会观。凯鲁亚克在小说中创造了一种全新的自动写作 手法——“狂野散文”，他的“生活实录”小说往往带有一种漫无情节的随意性和挑衅性，颠覆了传统的写作风格。其疏狂漫游、沉思顿悟的人生成为“垮掉的一代”的一种理想。

威廉•巴勒斯（William S. Burroughs，1914-1997），美国作家，与艾伦•金斯伯格及杰克•凯鲁亚克同为“垮掉的一代”文学运动的创始者，但他的写作更具有后现代主义者特征。主要作品有《瘾君子》、《裸体午餐》、《西部之地》和《新星快车》三部曲等，其中，《裸体午餐》在出版后引起了极大的争论，但如今已被奉为“垮掉的一代”的经典之作。巴勒斯的一生充满了传奇，沉溺毒品达十五年之久，晚年游戏演艺界，创作了很多通俗歌曲，并参与广告、电影等拍摄事业。