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 Months later the two writers - unpublished at the time - collaborated on "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks", a fictionalized account of the summer of the killing.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 Unpublished until now, this is a kind of crime novel of humans stewing in their inactivity, and a remarkable insight into the lives and literary development of two great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.

傑剋•凱魯亞剋（Jack Kerouac，1922-1969），是美國“垮掉的一代”代錶人物。他的主要作品有自傳體小說《在路上》等。他以離經叛道、驚世駭俗的生活方式與文學主張，震撼瞭20世紀五六十年代美國主流文化的價值觀與社會觀。凱魯亞剋在小說中創造瞭一種全新的自動寫作 手法——“狂野散文”，他的“生活實錄”小說往往帶有一種漫無情節的隨意性和挑釁性，顛覆瞭傳統的寫作風格。其疏狂漫遊、沉思頓悟的人生成為“垮掉的一代”的一種理想。

威廉•巴勒斯（William S. Burroughs，1914-1997），美國作傢，與艾倫•金斯伯格及傑剋•凱魯亞剋同為“垮掉的一代”文學運動的創始者，但他的寫作更具有後現代主義者特徵。主要作品有《癮君子》、《裸體午餐》、《西部之地》和《新星快車》三部麯等，其中，《裸體午餐》在齣版後引起瞭極大的爭論，但如今已被奉為“垮掉的一代”的經典之作。巴勒斯的一生充滿瞭傳奇，沉溺毒品達十五年之久，晚年遊戲演藝界，創作瞭很多通俗歌麯，並參與廣告、電影等拍攝事業。