The Motorcycle Diaries (book) not the only person that was editing and reshaping his notes. While Paulo Drinot contends that the Cuban government, as well as others, reworked the texts for self-fashioning or political benefits. However, Drinot also points out that Guevara's introduction explicitly mentions how the notes are "reorganized" and "polished", and that such a practicality should in no way undermine its utility as a historical source. The Motorcycle Diaries (book) The Motorcycle Diaries () is a memoir that traces the early travels of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, then a 23-year-old medical student, and his friend Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist. Leaving
United States in the 1950s literature, with the institutionally established modernist tradition, and most writers feeling compelled to self-censor themselves. This would clash with the "Beat fiction" which pushed the boundaries of what was considered allowed, causing a liberating and exciting cultural effect which encouraged other writers to free up. For this, the "Beat movement was met with a series of censorships and law enforcement excesses. Beatniks and the Beat Generation, an anti-materialistic literary movement whose name was invented by Jack Kerouac in 1948 and stretched on into the early-mid-1960s, was at its zenith in the 1950s. Such groundbreaking literature from the beats includes William