Robert Frank

Pull My Daisy is a collectable object containing Robert Frank's famous film of 1959 on DVD; a text booklet with an introduction, the transcript of the film and lyrics to the opening song; and a photo-magazine of on-set documentary photos by John Cohen. Pull My Daisy typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Pull My Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of a stage play he never finished entitled Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It stars Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross and Pablo, Frank's then infant son. Based on an incident in the life of Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn, the movie tells the story of a railway brakeman whose painter wife invites a respectable bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy was praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Leslie revealed in 1968 that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank. Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1924 and immigrated to the United States in 1947. He is best known for his seminal book The Americans, first published in 1959. Frank's other important projects include the books Black White and Things (1952), and Lines of My Hand (1972), as well as the film Cocksucker Blues (1972) for the Rolling Stones. He divides his time between New York City and Nova Scotia, Canada.