October 10, 1898 [Łódź, Poland] – July 9, 1975 [Los Angeles, California]
Lipton was born in Łódź, Poland, the son of Rose and Abraham Lipton. The family moved to the United States in 1903 and settled in Chicago. Lipton worked as a graphic artist and journalist for the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish-language daily socialist newspaper. During the 1920s, he associated with Chicago writers Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Harriet Monroe, Ben Hecht, and Carl Sandburg and wrote for Atlantic Monthly, Quarterly Review of Literature and Chicago Review while co-authoring several mystery novels. In 1957, he produced and directed a series of poetry-and-jazz concerts that became the first West Coast Poetry and Jazz Festival, dedicated to Dylan Thomas, becoming the Southern California counterpoint to fellow Chicagoan Kenneth Rexroth. In 1959, he wrote Holy Barbarians, a study of the Beat poets living in Venice (where he had since moved), a book that, one the one hand, brought several writers (like Charles Foster and John Idlet) to Los Angeles to escape mainstream culture, but on the other fed the many caricatures of Beat life that proliferated in the media. Erotic Revolution: An Affirmative View of the New Morality followed in 1965. He was married several times, most notably in the late-30s to the mystery writer Craig Rice (Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig). He published two literary novels, Brother, The Laugh is Bitter (1942) and In Secret Battle (1944).
