Tytell was born in Antwerp, Belgium. As Tytell would later write about this time period in his book Reading New York, literature was both an escape from the gloom of his darkened bedroom, as well as a subversive act of defiance, because he was forbidden to read for fear that the strain would damage his eyes. This book was quickly followed by Passionate Lives, a study of both English and American writers, and the relationships that helped form their creative visions, which was translated into German and Korean.Error in chronology. This book written earlier!!! The Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage saw Tytell casting his eye from literature to the stage, where he saw the same rebellious spirit typified in The Beat culture, exert itself in the Living Theatre, which is both a New York and an American institution. Tytell next teamed up with his wife, Mellon Tytell, whose photographic study of many Beat literary figures mirrored his own writing, to produce the book, Paradise Outlaws. The book is an overarching picture of both the major and minor figures of the Beat Generation. Mellon provided photographs of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, as well as Carl Solomon, Jan Kerouac and others, while Tytell wrote complementing descriptions of those depicted, and a text commenting on the significance and importance of the Beats. The book can be seen as a follow up to Naked Angels, but with the added advantage of a 25-year-removed perspective, to the lasting importance of the now widely recognized literary movement—a movement he first brought into the realm of legitimacy. Reading New York, published in 2003 is a hybrid of memoir, biography of American writers, history of New York, as well as literary criticism. The book spans from Melville to the present day, and weaves Tytell's life with those of the mainly New York writers who had inspired him since those nights of reading in the dark, that lead him to a fifty-year career in the printed word.
Paradise Outlaws: Remembering the Beats, William Morrow/Harper Collins: New York, 1999. Photographs by Mellon Tytell
The Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage, Grove Press: New York, 1995. Paperback edition: Grove Press, 1997. British edition: Methuen, 1997. Spanish edition: Los Libros de la Liebre de Marzo, Barcelona, 1999.
Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano, Doubleday: New York, 1987, and Bloomsbury: London. Paperback edition: Doubleday, Anchor, 1988. French edition for La Font Seghers: Paris, 1990. Second French edition for Editions du Rocher, 2002. American reprint: Ivan S. Dee, 2004.
Naked Angels: Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation, McGraw Hill, 1976. Paperback edition, 1977. Japanese edition, 1978. German edition, 1979. Grove Press edition, 1986. Grove Weidenfeld Evergreen edition, 1991. Czech Republic edition: Votobia, 1997. Ivan Dee edition, 2006.
