Background

Jay Stevens was born on November 1, 1953, in Vermont, United States.

Education

Jay Stevens attended a state university in Vermont.

Career

Jay Stevens is a freelance journalist based in Vermont who amassed a good deal of research into the psychedelic movement when he visited Malibu - an important site in its history - during the early 1980s. The result was his critically praised book, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, which Library Journal critic Carol R. Glatt called “gripping.” In Storming Heaven Stevens chronicles the rise of LSD from its early laboratory beginnings to its underground popularity among psychotherapists and the avant-garde cognoscenti of the 1950s, to its almost mainstream emergence after Harvard professor Timothy Leary and others experimented with it in the 1960s. Starting as a legal drug which was (usually) employed with care by serious therapists in an effort to explore the human mind and cure patients, LSD became a notorious pirated substance misused by large numbers, some of whom never recovered from its adverse effects.

In addition to this history, Stevens provides personality profiles of some of the people most well known for their involvement with the counterculture, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, and others. Of these figures, Aldous Huxley and Leary himself emerge “most clearly,” in the opinion of the New York Times Book Review critic Daniel X. Freedman. A Publishers Weekly reviewer referred to these portraits and historical snapshots as “vividly etched”; Glatt called them “pulsing portraits”; and Freedman commended the book’s “vivid anecdotes” and “spirited yarns.” Calling the volume “an annotated (but not error-free) scrapbook for future studies,” Freedman did note a lack of historical and scientific perspective as compared to the abundance of anecdote. Glatt, however, called Storming Heaven “social history at its most compelling.”

These glowing reviews did not prevent the book from going the way of many other products of the major publishing houses. About a year and a half after the release of the paperback, Stevens received a notice from his publisher advising him that sales had not met expectations and offering him the opportunity to buy some of the three thousand to-be-remaindered copies at a discount. Piqued, Stevens bought all three thousand and stored them in a warehouse in North Carolina. Although uncertain at first of how to sell them, he generated enough interest to exhaust the first edition and sold six more printings as the years went on. The advent of the Internet proved fortuitous, enabling Stevens to sell copies directly to consumers interested in the subject matter. As he put it in an online communique, he found himself becoming something of a cult author, “Blessedly free from those amazing Suits and accounting elves who somehow manage to sell millions of dollars worth of books without ever generating any money for most of the artists who create them.”

Stevens’s other works include prefaces for a series of 1960s-era books reissued by Citadel Press or Harper; and co-authorship of Drumming at the Edge of Magic (1990), a book on the spiritual aspects of percussion written with Fredric Lieberman and Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart.

Jay Stevens is the founder of Rap Lab, a program that brings together "youth at risk" and local musicians following the philosophy that "any town can be Motown."

Achievements

• Jay Stevens managed to create the number of books that became bestsellers end were multiply reprinted for several years. He became something of a cult author writing about LSD experience.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Time Inspectors

    (Why are all the clocks in the school displaying different...)

    2014
  • Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream

    (Storming Heaven digs beneath the headlines to bring an am...)

    1998
  • Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey into the Spirit of Percussion

    (Explores the role of drums, rattles, and gongs in human s...)

    1990
  • Planet Drum: A Celebration of Percussion and Rhythm

    (Examines the uses of percussion and rhythm throughout his...)

    1991

• music

  • Dance House 2012

Views

A leading proponent of the Orphic Revival, Jay Stevens performs his poetry with a shifting band of musicians known as 'The Raven.'

Interests

• Traveling

Connections

Jay Stevens married Sara DeGennaro.

Wife:

Sara DeGennaro

co-author:

Mickey Hart

co-author:

Fredric Lieberman

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166 This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
  1998