Irving Wexler was once spoken of in the same breath as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. His early poems, circulating in mimeographed chapbooks and small readings on the Lower East Side, promised a new voice of restless energy—raw, ecstatic, and unflinchingly honest. Yet, unlike his contemporaries, Wexler never ascended into the canon of the Beat Generation. By the mid-1960s he had disappeared into obscurity, his name barely a footnote in the histories of American counterculture.

Finding Wexler is an experiment in literary archaeology, reconstructing the scattered fragments of a poet’s life. Blending biography, cultural history, and investigative narrative, the book assembles surviving traces—poems, letters, photographs, reviews, police reports, and oral testimony—to piece together the portrait of a man who seemed both destined for greatness and determined to vanish.

The story moves from the jazz-soaked nights of 1950s Greenwich Village to the haze of San Francisco coffeehouses, from abandoned manuscripts in dusty archives to whispered recollections from those who claim to have known him. Along the way, it interrogates not only Wexler’s fate, but also the ways literary history is written, remembered, and forgotten. Was he undone by addiction? Silenced by politics? Or was obscurity itself his final act of defiance?

In reconstructing Wexler’s broken trail, the book becomes a meditation on the fragility of artistic legacy, the accidents of fame, and the countless voices lost in the shadows of cultural movements. Finding Wexler is less about solving a mystery than about living within one, offering readers the thrill of discovery and the melancholy of absence.

Finding Wexler: Reconstructing the Life of A Lost Beat Poet

£190.00

Quantity

Daniel Hirshman
Daniel Hirshman (b. 1972, Hartford, Connecticut) is a writer, cultural historian, and documentarian of lost or imagined figures in twentieth-century art and literature. Educated at Columbia University and later at the University of Sussex, Hirshman’s work bridges scholarship and speculation, blending archival research with techniques borrowed from oral history, journalism, and conceptual art.

Before turning to literary investigations, Hirshman worked as a photo archivist and critic, contributing essays on outsider poets, marginal presses, and the aesthetics of disappearance to The Believer, Cabinet, and The White Review. His early book Phantom Cities: Cartographies of the Unfound (2012) examined the relationship between urban space and creative mythmaking, tracing how vanished districts of New York and London persist as narrative ghosts in literature and music.

Finding Wexler (2025) continues this fascination with absence. Part biography, part dossier, part speculative reconstruction, the book retraces the scattered traces of the obscure Beat-era poet Irving Wexler. Hirshman treats rumor and evidence with equal weight, arguing that “every archive is an act of invention.” The project draws on years of fieldwork in San Francisco, Tangier, and Paris, where he consulted police files, small-press ledgers, and the private papers of minor editors and landlords.

Critics have described Hirshman’s method as “forensic poetics”—a hybrid of investigative journalism and literary séance. His narrative voice moves between the analytic and the lyrical, inviting readers to experience research itself as a form of storytelling.

He currently teaches part-time in the Department of Cultural Memory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-edits Margin Notes, a journal devoted to “documents that never quite existed.”

Hirshman lives between London and Lisbon. He collects first-edition mimeograph magazines, 1960s postcards, and abandoned typewriters.
What you will receive get when you invest in an undercurrent cultural artefact.

A hand-numbered limited edition print featuring the front cover artwork beautifully presented in a solid wood frame.

Printed on 300 gsm museum-quality art paper.

Each print comes with a certificate of authentication and is limited to just 100 prints.

Each print is supported by a research dossier containing supplementary material complementing the ideas contained within the ”book”. This may include an extended synopsis, table of contents, author biography, an interview with the author, additional art work, a sample chapter, facsimile copies of news paper articles, letters, emails, diaries, research papers and original documents.

Finding Wexler: Reconstructing the Life of A Lost Beat Poet

Author

Author's Bio

Library Classification

An Undercurrent Artefact

Artist