A lot was going on in the art, literary and music scenes in San Francisco at that time that had their origins in the “Beat Scene” of the mid to late 1950s and early 1960s. This Booklet is the catalog is from an exhibit of photographs at the Gotham Book Mart Gallery in New York City that was held in the fall of 1975.The photographs are primarily images, portraits if you will, of the artists and poets who, from the late 1950s and the early-to-mid 1960s, were acknowledged to have liberated artistic and poetic minds “from the strictures of predisposed form.” By 1956 the word was out: a new cultural wave, that became known as the San Francisco Renaissance, was flowing out of San Francisco that was significant not only in its own right, but also as the precursor, the foundation if you will, for the counterculture explosion that took place during the Haight Ashbury district’s 1967 “Summer of Love” that would wash over the country, and to some degree the entire western world. According to Wikipedia, the father of the renaissance was Kenneth Kenneth Rexroth—poet, translator, critic, and author. Rexroth was a prominent second generation modernist poet who was among the first American poets to explore Japanese poetry traditions such as haiku and was also heavily influenced by jazz. Why did it take place in San Francisco? This booklet offers a clue that I have found no where else: During World War II, conscientious objectors were detained for years in special housing units in military camps throughout the West. When the war ended, they were released and many of them migrated to San Francisco, where their anti-war, free-thinker sentiments coalesced with the city’s historically liberal culture to form the basis of the anti-war American counterculture that we know today.