- New York City Beats
- Howl and Other Poems
- Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict
- Naked Lunch
- On the Road
- The First Third and Other Writings
- Go
- Bomb
- "Let Us Inspect the Lyre"
- "Let Us Inspect the Lyre"
- Huncke's Journal
- "The Entrance of The Grand Gladiola"
- This Kind of Bird Flies Backward
- Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
Originally called "The Beat Generation," Go is the first published literary work to use the term "beat." A friend of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Clellon Holmes viewed the Beat scene from the sidelines. Go is a thinly disguised account lifted directly from the lives of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and others who hung around Joan Vollmer's (the future Mrs. William Burroughs) apartment near Columbia University. Holmes attempts to capture the essence of the Beat experience: "It was a world of dingy backstairs "pads," Times Square cafeterias, bebop joints, night-long wanderings, meetings on street corners, hitchhiking, a myriad of "hip" bars all over the city, and the streets themselves. It was inhabited by people "hung-up" with drugs and other habits, searching out a new degree of craziness, and connected by the invisible threads of need, petty crimes long ago, or a strange recognition of affinity. They kept going all the time, living by night, rushing around to "make contact," suddenly disappearing into jail or on the road only to turn up again and search one another out. They had an idea of life that was underground, mysterious, and they seemed unaware of anything outside the realities of deals, a pad to stay in, 'digging the frantic jazz,' and keeping everything going... you know, everyone I know is kind of furtive, kind of beat."