Armed Love: Inside America's Communes

Armed Love, first published in 1971, is a description of the author's experience in America-s communes. Katz documents the people, the sex, the drugs, and the various organizations of communal lifestyles from New York City to San Francisco. 


The best portrayal of contemporary youth in the United States. -New Haven Register


Elia Katz-can really write, and not only can he write, he can think, too, and among young writers that is far rarer. -Michael Rogers, Rolling Stone


Hilarious, whimsical, touching-as much a work of fiction as Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel, except that Wolfe thought he was writing fiction and Katz knows he is writing nonfiction. Armed Love is within a long literary tradition in American literature, from Natty Bumppo's moving out west to Dean Moriarty's speeding down the highway in On the Road. -New York Herald


He began in absolute sympathy with the drop-out children of affluent America-but experience with them forced him to acknowledge that the search for an impossible freedom had shaped them into an incongruous mirror-image of the values they tried to flee-Katz's book is both corrosively funny and serious, and reads with the verve and immediacy of a good novel. -Publishers Weekly