Beat Generation

Notable writers of the Beat Generation include (from left): William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. All were from the previous generation.

The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced the American culture and American politics in the post–World War II and Cold War eras. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by members of the Silent Generation in the mid-to-late 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.

Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959), and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best-known examples of Beat literature. Both "Howl" and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States. The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.

The core group of Beat Generation authors—Herbert Huncke, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Kerouac—met in 1944 on and around Columbia University's campus in New York City. Later, in the mid-1950s, the central figures, except Burroughs and Carr, ended up together in San Francisco, where they met and became friends of figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance.

In the 1950s, a Beatnik subculture formed around the literary movement, although this was often viewed critically by major authors of the Beat movement. In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the hippie and larger counterculture movements. Neal Cassady, as the driver for Ken Kesey's bus Furthur, was the primary bridge between these two generations. Ginsberg's work also became an integral element of 1960s hippie culture, in which he actively participated. The hippie culture was practiced primarily by older members of the following generation, the baby boomers.

Etymology

A conversation in 1948 between Kerouac and writer John Clellon Holmes led to the accidental naming of the 'Beat Generation'. It was in this discussion that Kerouac dismissed Holmes' question around classifying the generation, "not meaning to name the generation – but to unname it" In turn, this characterized a perceived underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York. The article This Is the Beat Generation was published in 1952 in The New York Times Magazine and while it coined the movement, it also introduced and outlined the term 'beat'. Kerouac credited junkie, hustler, and writer Herbert Huncke with first using the word "beat". in an earlier discussion with him.

The adjective "beat" could colloquially mean "tired" or "beaten down" within the African-American community of the period and had developed out of the image "beat to his socks", but Kerouac expanded on the meaning to include the connotations "upbeat", "beatific", and the musical association of being "on the beat", and "the Beat to keep" from the Beat Generation poem It was also understood to mean being "emptied out, exhausted" and simultaneously "wide-open and receptive to vision."

Significant places

Columbia University

The origins of the Beat Generation can be traced to Columbia University and the meeting of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carr, Hal Chase and others. Kerouac attended Columbia on a football scholarship. Though the beats are usually regarded as anti-academic, many of their ideas were formed in response to professors like Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. Classmates Carr and Ginsberg discussed the need for a "New Vision" (a term borrowed from W. B. Yeats), to counteract what they perceived as their teachers' conservative, formalistic literary ideals.

Greenwich Village

Beat writers and artists flocked to Greenwich Village in New York City in the late 1950s because of low rent and the "small town" element of the scene. Folksongs, readings and discussions often took place in Washington Square Park. Allen Ginsberg was a big part of the scene in the Village, as was Burroughs, who lived at 69 Bedford Street.

Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and other poets frequented many bars in the area, including the San Remo Cafe at 93 MacDougal Street on the northwest corner of Bleecker, Chumley's, and Minetta Tavern. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and other abstract expressionists were also frequent visitors of and collaborators with the Beats. Cultural critics have written about the transition of Beat culture in the Village into the Bohemian hippie culture of the 1960s.

In 1960, a presidential election year, the Beats formed a political party, the "Beat Party," and held a mock nominating convention to announce a presidential candidate: the African-American street poet Big Brown, won a majority of votes on the first ballot but fell short of the eventual nomination. The Associated Press reported, "Big Brown's lead startled the convention. Big, as the husky African American is called by his friends, wasn't the favorite son of any delegation, but he had one tactic that earned him votes. In a chatterbox convention, only once did he speak at length, and that was to read his poetry."

Ginsberg had visited Neal and Carolyn Cassady in San Jose, California in 1954 and moved to San Francisco in August. He fell in love with Peter Orlovsky at the end of 1954 and began writing "Howl". Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of the new City Lights Bookstore, started to publish the City Lights Pocket Poets Series in 1955.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Kenneth Rexroth's apartment became a Friday night literary salon (Ginsberg's mentor William Carlos Williams, an old friend of Rexroth, had given him an introductory letter). When asked by Wally Hedrick to organize the Six Gallery reading, Ginsberg wanted Rexroth to serve as master of ceremonies.[citation needed]

Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Ginsberg and Gary Snyder read on October 7, 1955, before 100 people (including Kerouac, up from Mexico City). Lamantia read poems of his late friend John Hoffman. At his first public reading, Ginsberg performed the just finished first part of "Howl". It was a success and the evening led to many more readings by the now locally famous Six Gallery poets.

It was also a marker of the beginning of the Beat movement since the 1956 publication of "Howl" (City Lights Pocket Poets, no. 4), and its obscenity trial in 1957 brought it to nationwide attention.

The Six Gallery reading informs the second chapter of Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, whose chief protagonist is Japhy Ryder, a character who is based on Gary Snyder. Kerouac was impressed with Snyder and they were close for several years. In the spring of 1955, they lived together in Snyder's cabin in Mill Valley, California. Most Beats were urbanites and they found Snyder almost exotic, with his rural background and wilderness experience, as well as his education in cultural anthropology and Oriental languages. Lawrence Ferlinghetti called him "the Thoreau of the Beat Generation."

As documented in the conclusion of The Dharma Bums, Snyder moved to Japan in 1955, in large measure to intensively practice and study Zen Buddhism. He spent most of the next 10 years there. Buddhism is one of the primary subjects of The Dharma Bums, and the book undoubtedly helped to popularize Buddhism in the West and remains one of Kerouac's widely read books.

Pacific Northwest and the West Coast

The Beats also spent time in the Northern Pacific Northwest including Washington and Oregon. Kerouac wrote about sojourns to Washington's North Cascades in The Dharma Bums and On the Road.[32] Reed College in Portland, Oregon was also a locale for some of the Beat poets with Gary Snyder studying anthropology, Philip Whalen studying courses in "creative writing, graphic arts, language, and literature." and Ginsberg held multiple readings on the campus around 1955 and 1956. Snyder and Whalen were students in Reed's calligraphy class taught by Lloyd J. Reynolds.

The West Coast, specifically San Francisco, is often associated with significant inspiration and contribution to the Beat movement and avant-garde, particularly concerning the visual arts. A culture was cultivated through artists, poets, filmmakers, and jazz affiliations with those in the West Coast, such as Wallace Berman and Robert Alexander's connection with Charlie Parker in the Los Angeles recording studio in 1946. Berman was a core figure among the West Coast with an compelling presence and ability which provided numerous "places to gather, connections, esoteric information, and encouragement" In 1955 he began his assemblage publication Seminar which featured a variety of art, media, poetry formats and alongside other poets, additionally featured sections from Burrough's Naked Lunch.

A center ground for the movement derived from the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) as the "postwar period opened up rich, diverse, and unlikely possibilities to its students." The exploration and experimentation it fostered encouraged methods such as collage, abstract expressionism and photography to break historic artistic barriers. This resulted in a mass expression of the political and cultural climate of the forties and fifties postwar period. Jess Collins is a primary example of this phenomenon, as after he gave up his chemistry career (due to the threat of nuclear war), he enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts in 1949 and concentrated on expression through collage. Wally Hedrick, a Korean war veteran, enrolled in 1952 and specifically used black paintings to oppose war, as well as creating "strong iconic images".

The artistic community of the US West Coast absorbed ideas of the Abstract expressionism movement that were infused into Beat culture as old methods were challenged or completely disregarded. New forms of poetry, photography, art, or literature arose and mutually influenced each other, whether the individual artists were in direct communication or never formally introduced. The "street-level realism" writing of the Beats "was a harbinger of new emerging forms in the visual arts, namely junk sculpture, assemblage and Happenings". Jackson Pollock's action painting was the source of many Beats' inspiration, so much so that poet and playwright Michael McClure advised Pollock's work "was integral to his own life and thought".

Significant Figures and Events

External videos
video icon Discussion of biographies of Beat poets Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, and others, October 22, 1996, C-SPAN
David Kammerer's Death

Burroughs was introduced to the group by David Kammerer. Lucien Carr had befriended Ginsberg and introduced him to Kammerer and Burroughs. Carr also knew Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Parker, through whom Burroughs met Kerouac in 1944.

On August 14, 1944 Carr killed Kammerer with a Boy Scout knife in Riverside Park in what he claimed later was self-defense He dumped the body in the Hudson River, later seeking advice from Burroughs, who suggested he turn himself in. He then went to Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the weapon Carr turned himself in the following morning and later pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Kerouac was charged as an accessory, and Burroughs as a material witness, but neither were prosecuted. Carr was released in 1946

Kerouac wrote about this incident twice in his works in his first novel The Town and the City and in his last novel Vanity of Duluoz. Burroughs co-wrote And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, concerning the murder According to Jonah Raskin, "Everyone in the know conspired to keep Carr's bisexuality a secret" in order to avoid any excessive or prejudice prosecutions of homosexuality. Ginsberg wrote to his brother, Eugene indicating and emphasising the success of their plan

Ginsberg's Arrest

Ginsberg was arrested on April 22, 1949 following a Police chase and having stolen goods of Herbert Huncke, Little Jack Melody (Jack Melodia) and Vickie Russell (Priscella Arminger) in his apartment The Police attempted to stop Melody who was driving without a licence in Queens with Russell and Ginsberg (who had joined the journey with the objective of taking his "journals and his love letters to other men" to his brother Eugene after Kerouac refused) with the intention of moving the stolen goods.

Melody crashed the car and though Ginsberg had broken his glasses, he managed to escape but left the incriminating journals and letters behind Friends, family, Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, and Jacques Barzun came together and it was put forward that a psychiatric hospital was the best course of action given Ginsberg's persistent use of heroin and marijuana. He was committed for eight months to the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where he met Carl Solomon.

Solomon was arguably more eccentric than psychotic. A fan of Antonin Artaud, he indulged in self-consciously "crazy" behavior, such as throwing potato salad at a college lecturer on Dadaism. Solomon was given shock treatments at the New York State Psychiatric Institute; this became one of the main themes of Ginsberg's "Howl", which was dedicated to Solomon. Though Solomon later clarified he was acting in favor of Dadaism and also denied shock treatments. Solomon agreed to publish Burroughs' first novel, Junkie, in 1953.

Joan Vollmer's Death

On Thursday 6th September 1951 Joan Vollmer (then Burroughs) was shot in the head by Burroughs after she was prompted by Burroughs to put a glass on her head. There were two additional witnesses, and though the exact details around the incident have differed in Burroughs's recollection, he had attended John Healy's apartment with the intention of selling the gun. He was released on bail thirteen days later then charged with imprudencia criminal (criminal negligence), being once more released on bail, but for a year, until he fled Mexico.

Vollmer had a significant presence among the Beats' circle through her literary knowledge and providing her apartment as "a literary salon of sorts" Burroughs described the death of Vollmer as the reason he became a writer, explaining if not for this incident, he would have not felt "a constant need to escape from possession, from Control" and advised he "had no choice except to write my way out."

Participants

Women

Although many of the most well-known members of the Beat Generation were men, the women of the Beat Generation,sometimes known as the 'beat chicks') were a crucial part of this movement "because of their marginalized position within society, these writers provide Beat thinking on the moment with a social valance unavailable to their more recognized colleagues." Beat Generation women who have been published include Edie Parker; Joyce Johnson; Carolyn Cassady; Hettie Jones; Joanne Kyger; Harriet Sohmers Zwerling; Diane DiPrima; Bonnie Bremser; Lenore Kandel; Elise Cowen; and ruth weiss, who also made films. Carolyn Cassady wrote her detailed account of life with her husband Neal Cassady which also included details about her affair with Jack Kerouac. She titled it Off the Road, and it was published in 1990. Poet Elise Cowen took her own life in 1962. Poet Anne Waldman was less influenced by the Beats than by Allen Ginsberg's later turn to Buddhism. Later, female poets emerged who claimed to be strongly influenced by the Beats, including Janine Pommy Vega in the 1960s, Patti Smith in the 1970s, and Hedwig Gorski in the 1980s.

Misogyny in The Beat Generation

"For decades, women writers associated with the Beat Generation have been an ignored presence." Societal expectations of the time period (1940s-1960s) seeped into this literary movement; "relegated to the home, women were effectively immobilized. Along with this stifling spacial mobility came a concomitant stifling of temporal freedom." The Beat Generation was considered an all 'boys club', women were still seen as submissive and therefore were overshadowed by the respected and established male Beat writers. Expectations of 'the housewife' and the notion that "domesticity is a personal service," allowed woman's voices within this movement to be overlooked. Catharine R. Stimpson argues that Male Beat writers "wanted women to be one of two things: agents of Aphrodite, to shell out in bed, to wave happily from the froth of orgies or agents of The Great Mother, be she a mother or a nurturing wife", reminiscent of the Madonna-whore complex, fetishizing and making a caricature out of womanhood. Similar to any literary canon, this movement was highly saturated by male writers and "what was ultimately at stake in discussions of domesticity was who got to define women's roles during the period."

African-Americans

Although African-Americans were not widely represented in the Beat Generation, the presence of black writers, poets and musicians contributed significantly to the movement's progression. African-Americans "represented a contradictory, double-sided America as yet unveiled, presenting an authenticity as real as American inequality itself", and were 10% of American population in 1950.

Though issues of race and sexuality were discussed by Beats, they were mostly spoken from a white perspective. However, core African-American figures in the Beat generation including: Bob Kaufman, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Ted Joans, Charlie Parker and Alene Lee challenged this, bringing attention to black culture through music, language and art African-American vernacular rejected historic and current oppression, providing "a cultural cohesion within the Beat counterculture and the avant-garde".

Alongside Joans' publication of Beat Poems 1957, he began performing poetry from 1958 in coffeehouses and he and Fred W. McDarrah formed Rent-A-Beatnik, whereby Joans typically arrived as the 'renter' and performed poetry As with many Beats jazz acted a tool which inspired and generated Kaufman's writing and technique. Although he was a former labour activist he continued to remain political with works such as The Golden Sardine addressing the conviction of Caryl Chessman In 1959 he was the co-founder among Ginsberg, John Kelly and William Margolis of the literary journal Beatitude of which Ginsberg advised Kaufman was "the driving force"

Writer LeRoi Jones married Hettie Jones (formerly Cohen) in 1958 and the two co-founded the poetry and literary magazine Yūgen and Totem Press He ran The Floating Bear with Diane di Prima (of which one issue had them arrested for obscenity). Along with producing his own works, he participated in the Umbra Workshop 1962 founded by black writers, Tom Dent, Calvin Henton and David Henderson, and edited the essential anthology The Moderns 1963 which consisted of mostly Beat writers Following the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, he departed from the Beats and divorced Cohen to focus on Black Nationalism and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem

Culture and Influences

Sexuality

One of the key beliefs and practices of the Beat Generation was free love and sexual liberation, which strayed from the Christian ideals of American culture at the time. Some Beat writers were openly gay or bisexual, including two of the most prominent (Ginsberg and Burroughs).

Female Beat writers such as di Prima, Johnson, Lenore Kandel, and Vega approached sexuality differently from the male writers of this movement. They challenged "masculine notions of orgasmic transcendence" and offered their own versions of sexuality. At the time of this movement, "it was no longer acceptable for a wife to shut her husband out of the bedroom. Starting in the 1950's sex was viewed as a key component of a healthy marriage." Women's sexuality was widely linked to bearing children, therefore it was seen as a woman's duty rather than something from which she could derive pleasure.

Drug use

The original members of the Beat Generation used several different drugs, including alcohol, marijuana, benzedrine, morphine, and later psychedelic drugs such as peyote, ayahuasca, and LSD. They often approached drugs experimentally, initially being unfamiliar with their effects. Their drug use was broadly inspired by intellectual interest, and many Beat writers thought that their drug experiences enhanced creativity, insight, or productivity. The use of drugs was a key influence on many of the social events of the time that were personal to the Beat generation.

Women's Influence on The Beat Generation

Many women are responsible for the documentation and distribution of works from the Beat Generation. The women surrounding Beat writer Bob Kaufman were partially responsible for his work being as well known as it is today. Kaufman's sister Marion was considered the family historian, and Kaufman's wife (1958–1986) Eileen Kaufman aided him in writing out his poetry and organizing it into the book Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. She also helped to found and edit Beatitude with Bob Kaufman. Another prominent Beat woman Diane di Prima was responsible for establishing and running Poets Press, which published her own works and the works of other Beat writers (but not exclusively Beat literature).

Politics and Media

The increasing threat of communism, specifically in the 1950's era of McCarthyism and the terror of a 'Red Scare' led to the Beat generation facing more backlash and hatred from main spread media and the political landscape. Targeting this area of counterculture and fearmongering the public against individuals who did not conform to the society's ideal behaviour was the governments' way to get tensions of themselves and divert the public's attention.

The US government viewed The Beats as a threat because they contradicted principles that the government stood for during an era of political uncertainty and unrest. "They sought to make spontaneity and deliberate defenselessness supreme virtues at a time when over-militarization and its concomitant creed of preparedness first became U.S. foreign and domestic policy". The Beats strongly opposed the US military and the increase in national militarism—their non-conformity to the traditional American way of life was unsettling to complacent citizens. The image of the military was at the forefront of what America stood for and the power it held, especially when faced with an aggressive Soviet Union and the imminent threat presented by the Cold War.[citation needed]

The idea of othering within the government became even more apparent,[citation needed] leading the government to assert criticism and blame on to the countercultures, especially because "that cliched American Dream was advertised everywhere".[citation needed] This "dream" that America was trying to sell to society was unavailing with racial segregation still seen as normal and the fear of communism and The Red Scare on the rise. The idea of America's 'Melting Pot' and the concept of a utopian country began to unravel, and the systemic issues that The Beats were protesting finally were coming to light, especially "when The Beats achieved literary fame their counterculture represented the forefront of the New Left and was synonymous with succeeding protest cultures of the 1960s". .

It was much easier for the government to label a group of people not conforming to their socially acceptable ideologies than address the real issues in the country like the reprecussions of The Great Depression, the civil rights movement, the continuation of segregation laws, and discrimination.

The extent of this unsettlement became objectively apparent when J. Edgar Hoover, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the US, "declared the "Beatniks" a threat to national security in 1961". This emphasizes the large-scale influence and momentum that was being carried by The Beats in this moment.

Kerouac shared Ginsberg sentiment criticising the government for being 'an ever-more sinister police state run by FBI and blinded by "cowardice hysteria... piling up arms and pathological propaganda" This idea of censorship and surveillance as well as the military use in the States were some of the main areas to inspire The Beats Generation rebellion against the mainstream society.

Hedonism

Hedonism is defined as the concept of "living and behaving in ways that mean you get as much pleasure out of life as possible, according to the belief that the most important thing you can do in life is enjoy yourself".

According to Petrus, "it is clear today that the authors of most of the pieces misrepresented their subjects, exaggerated stereotypes, took quotations out of context, and cleverly used illustrations for a desired effect". He says Kerouac "objected vehemently to the violent depiction of the hipster". He separated "the Beat Generation, on a spiritual quest, from juvenile delinquents, who, in fact, were sinful and indifferent".

"Holmes argued that spirituality existed in this generation despite the growing presence of juvenile delinquency, social irresponsibility, and apathy in communal activity and orthodox religion". This notion of belief in something higher than themselves (a divine intervention), and acceptance of spirituality contradicted the fundamental structure of hedonism and the unlimited freedom it offered. The relationship between hedonism and The Beats is complicated mixed with exaggerated media tales and a loss of what the members believed in.

Romanticism

Gregory Corso considered English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley a hero, and he was buried at the foot of Shelley's grave in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. Ginsberg mentions Shelley's poem Adonais at the beginning of his poem Kaddish, and cites it as a major influence on the composition of one of his important poems. Michael McClure compared Ginsberg's Howl to Shelley's breakthrough poem Queen Mab.

Ginsberg's main Romantic influence was William Blake, and he studied him throughout his life. Blake was the subject of Ginsberg's self-defining auditory hallucination and revelation in 1948. Romantic poet John Keats also was cited as an influence.[citation needed]

Jazz

Writers of the Beat Generation were heavily influenced by jazz artists like Billie Holiday and the stories told through the music. Writers like Jack Kerouac (On the Road), Bob Kaufman ("Round About Midnight," "Jazz Chick," and "O-Jazz-O"), and Frank O'Hara ("The Day Lady Died") incorporated the emotions they felt toward jazz. They used their pieces to discuss feelings, people, and objects they associate with jazz music, as well as life experiences that reminded them of this style of music. Kaufman's pieces listed above "were intended to be freely improvisational when read with Jazz accompaniment" (Charters 327). He and other writers found inspiration in this genre and allowed it to help fuel the Beat movement.

Early American Sources

The Beats were inspired by early American figures in the transcendentalist movement, such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville and especially Walt Whitman, who is addressed as the subject of one of Ginsberg's most famous poems, "A Supermarket in California". Edgar Allan Poe was occasionally acknowledged, and Ginsberg saw Emily Dickinson as having an influence on Beat poetry. The 1926 novel You Can't Win by outlaw author Jack Black was cited as having a strong influence on Burroughs.

French Surrealism

In many ways, surrealism was still considered a vital movement in the 1950s. Carl Solomon introduced the work of French author Antonin Artaud to Ginsberg, and the poetry of André Breton had direct influence on Ginsberg's poem Kaddish.[citation needed] Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, John Ashbery and Ron Padgett translated French poetry. Second-generation Beat Ted Joans was named "the only Afro-American Surrealist" by Breton.

Philip Lamantia introduced Surrealist poetry to the original Beats. The poetry of Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman shows the influence of Surrealist poetry with its dream-like images and its random juxtaposition of dissociated images, and this influence can also be seen in more subtle ways in Ginsberg's poetry. As the legend goes, when meeting French Surrealist Marcel Duchamp, Ginsberg kissed his shoe and Corso cut off his tie.[page needed] Other influential French poets for the Beats were Guillaume Apollinaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire.[citation needed]

Modernism

Gertrude Stein was the subject of a book-length study by Lew Welch. Admitted influences for Kerouac include Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.

Buddhism and Daoism

Gary Snyder defined wild as "whose order has grown from within and is maintained by the force of consensus and custom rather than explicit legislation." "The wild is not brute savagery, but a healthy balance, a self-regulating system." Snyder attributed wild to Buddhism and Daoism, the interests of some Beats. "Snyder's synthesis uses Buddhist thought to encourage American social activism, relying on both the concept of impermanence and the classically American imperative toward freedom."

Beat Influence

A section devoted to the beat generation at a bookstore in Stockholm

While many authors claim to be directly influenced by the Beats, the Beat Generation phenomenon has had an influence on American culture leading more broadly to the hippie movements of the 1960s.[citation needed]

In 1982, Ginsberg published a summary of "the essential effects" of the Beat Generation:

"Beatniks"

The term "beatnik" was coined by Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 1958, blending the name of the recent Russian satellite Sputnik and Beat Generation. This suggested that beatniks were (1) "far out of the mainstream of society" and (2) "possibly pro-Communist." Caen's term stuck and became the popular label associated with a new stereotype—the man with a goatee and beret reciting nonsensical poetry and playing bongo drums while free-spirited women wearing black leotards dance.[citation needed]

An early example of the "beatnik stereotype" occurred in Vesuvio's (a bar in North Beach, San Francisco) which employed the artist Wally Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals, creating improvisational drawings and paintings. By 1958 tourists who came to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene, prophetically anticipating similar tours of the Haight-Ashbury district 10 years later.

A variety of other small businesses also sprang up exploiting (and/or satirizing) the new craze. In 1959, Fred McDarrah started a "Rent-a-Beatnik" service in New York, taking out ads in The Village Voice and sending Ted Joans and friends out on calls to read poetry.

"Beatniks" appeared in many cartoons, movies, and TV shows of the time, perhaps the most famous being the character Maynard G. Krebs in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959–1963).

While some of the original Beats embraced the beatniks, or at least found the parodies humorous (Ginsberg, for example, appreciated the parody in the comic strip Pogo) others criticized the beatniks as inauthentic poseurs. Jack Kerouac feared that the spiritual aspect of his message had been lost and that many were using the Beat Generation as an excuse to be senselessly wild.

"Hippies"

During the 1960s, aspects of the Beat movement metamorphosed into the counterculture of the 1960s, accompanied by a shift in terminology from "beatnik" to "hippie". Many of the original Beats remained active participants, notably Allen Ginsberg, who became a fixture of the anti-war movement. Notably, however, Jack Kerouac broke with Ginsberg and criticized the 1960s politically radical protest movements as an excuse to be "spiteful".

There were stylistic differences between beatniks and hippies—somber colors, dark sunglasses, and goatees gave way to colorful psychedelic clothing and long hair. The Beats were known for "playing it cool" (keeping a low profile).

Beyond style, there were changes in substance. The Beats tended to be essentially apolitical, but the hippies became actively engaged with the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.

Literary Legacy

Among the emerging novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, a few were closely connected with Beat writers, most notably Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). Though they had no direct connection, other writers considered the Beats to be a major influence, including Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow) and Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues).

William S. Burroughs is considered a forefather of postmodern literature; he also inspired the cyberpunk genre.

One-time Beat writer LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka helped initiate the Black Arts Movement.

As there was a focus on live performance among the Beats, many slam poets have claimed to be influenced by the Beats. Saul Williams, for example, cites Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Bob Kaufman as major influences.

The Postbeat Poets are direct descendants of the Beat Generation. Their association with or tutelage under Ginsberg at The Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and later at Brooklyn College stressed the social-activist legacy of the Beats and created its own body of literature. Known authors are Anne Waldman, Antler, Andy Clausen, David Cope, Eileen Myles, Eliot Katz, Paul Beatty, Sapphire, Lesléa Newman, Jim Cohn, Thomas R. Peters Jr. (poet and owner of beat book shop), Sharon Mesmer, Randy Roark, Josh Smith, Marc Olmsted and David Evans.[citation needed]

Rock and Pop Music

The Beats had a pervasive influence on rock and roll and popular music, including the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. The Beatles spelled their name with an "a" partly as a Beat Generation reference, and John Lennon was a fan of Jack Kerouac. The Beatles even put Beat writer William S. Burroughs on the cover of their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Ginsberg was a close friend of Bob Dylan and toured with him on the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. Dylan cites Ginsberg and other Beats as major influences.

Jim Morrison cites Kerouac as one of his biggest influences, and fellow Doors member Ray Manzarek has said "We wanted to be beatniks." In his book Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, Manzarek also writes "I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed." Michael McClure was also a friend of members of The Doors, at one point touring with Manzarek.

Ginsberg was a friend of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, a group of which Neal Cassady was a member, that also included members of the Grateful Dead. In the 1970s, Burroughs was a friend of Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Patti Smith.[citation needed]

The musical group Steely Dan is named after a steam-powered dildo in Burroughs' Naked Lunch. British progressive rock band Soft Machine is named after Burroughs' novel The Soft Machine.

Singer-songwriter Tom Waits, a Beat fan, wrote "Jack and Neal" about Kerouac and Cassady, and recorded "On the Road" (a song written by Kerouac after finishing the novel) with Primus. He later collaborated with Burroughs on the theatrical work The Black Rider.

Jazz musician/film composer Robert Kraft wrote and released a contemporary homage to Beat Generation aesthetics entitled "Beat Generation" on the 1988 album Quake City.

Musician Mark Sandman, who was the bass guitarist, lead vocalist, and a former member of the alternative jazz rock band Morphine, was interested in the Beat Generation and wrote a song called "Kerouac" as a tribute to Jack Kerouac and his philosophy and way of life.

The band Aztec Two-Step recorded "The Persecution & Restoration of Dean Moriarty (On the Road)" in 1972.

There was a resurgence of interest in the beats among bands in the 1980s. Ginsberg worked with the Clash and Burroughs worked with Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Kurt Cobain, and Ministry, among others.[citation needed] Bono of U2 cites Burroughs as a major influence, and Burroughs appeared briefly in a U2 video in 1997. Post-punk band Joy Division named a song "Interzone" after a collection of stories by Burroughs. Laurie Anderson featured Burroughs on her 1984 album Mister Heartbreak and in her 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave.[citation needed] The band King Crimson produced the album Beat inspired by the Beat Generation.

More recently, American artist Lana Del Rey references the Beat movement and Beat poetry in her 2014 song "Brooklyn Baby".[citation needed]

In 2021, rapper R.A.P. Ferreria released the album Bob's Son: R.A.P. Ferreira in the Garden Level Cafe of the Scallops Hotel, named for Bob Kaufman and containing many references to the work of Kaufman, Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, and other beat poets. [citation needed]

Criticism

The Beat Generation was met with scrutiny and assigned many stereotypes. Several magazines, including Life and Playboy, depicted members of the Beat Generation as nihilists and as nonintellectual. This criticism was largely due to the ideological differences between American culture at the time and the Beat Generation, including their Buddhist-inspired beliefs.

Norman Podhoretz, a student at Columbia with Kerouac and Ginsberg, later became a critic of the Beats. His 1958 Partisan Review article "The Know-Nothing Bohemians" was a vehement critique primarily of Kerouac's On the Road and The Subterraneans, as well as Ginsberg's "Howl". His central criticism is that the Beat's embrace of spontaneity is bound up in an anti-intellectual worship of the "primitive" that can easily turn toward mindlessness and violence. Podhoretz asserted that there was a link between the Beats and criminal delinquents.[citation needed]

Ginsberg responded in a 1958 interview with The Village Voice, specifically addressing the charge that the Beats destroyed "the distinction between life and literature". In the interview, he stated that "the bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are 'Intellectuals' and there are intellectuals. Podhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now—Proust, Wolfe, Faulkner, Joyce."

Internal Criticism

In a 1974 interview, Gary Snyder comments on the subject of "casualties" of the Beat Generation:

Kerouac was a casualty too. And there were many other casualties that most people have never heard of, but were genuine casualties. Just as, in the 60s, when Allen and I for a period there were almost publicly recommending people to take acid. When I look back on that now I realize there were many casualties, and responsibilities to bear.

When the Beats initially set out to "construct" new communities that shirked conformity and traditionalism, they invoked the symbols of the most marginalized ethnic identities of their time. As the reality set in, of racial self-identity lost within the communal constructs of their own making, most of the Beat writers altered their message drastically to acknowledge the social impulse to marginalize the self in the conflict between isolationism and absorption of self by communal instincts seeking belonging. They began to deeply engage with new themes such as the place of the white man in America and declining patriarchal institutions.

Quotes

Three writers do not make a generation.

— Gregory Corso (sometimes also attributed to Gary Snyder)

Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose.

— Allen Ginsberg

Films

See also

References

  1. ↑ Evans, Mike, The Beats: from Kerouac to Kesey : an illustrated journey through the Beat Generation, Running Press, Introduction
  2. ↑ The Beat Generation – Literature Periods & Movements.
  3. ↑ Charters, Ann (2001). Beat Down to Your Soul: What was the Beat Generation?. Penguin Books. ISBN 0141001518.
  4. ↑ Charters (1992) The Portable Beat Reader.
  5. ↑ Ann Charters, introduction, to Beat Down to Your Soul, Penguin Books (2001) ISBN 978-0-14100-151-7 p. xix "[...] the conclusion of the obscenity trial in San Francisco against Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems [...] in which Judge Clayton W. Horn concluded for the defendant that 'Howl' had what he called 'redeeming social content.'", p. xxxiii "After the successful "Howl" trial, outspoken and subversive literary magazines sprung up like wild mushrooms throughout the United States."
  6. ↑ Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw, New York: Avon, 1988. p. 347, trade paper edition ISBN 0-380-70882-5: "The ruling on Naked Lunch in effect marked the end of literary censorship in the United States."
  7. ↑ Ginsberg, A. (1995) Prologue. In Phillips, L (Ed), Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965. (p. 17). Flammarion.
  8. ↑ "Beat movement (American literary and social movement) – Encyclopædia Britannica". britannica.com. Retrieved November 30, 2014.
  9. ↑ Ginsberg, A. (1995) Prologue. In Phillips, L (Ed), Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965. (pp. 17-19). Flammarion.
  10. ↑ "Beat to his socks, which was once the black's most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation..." James Baldwin, "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What is it?," The New York Times, July 29, 1979.
  11. ↑ "The word 'beat' was primarily in use after World War II by jazz musicians and hustlers as a slang term meaning down and out, or poor and exhausted. The jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow combined it with other words, like 'dead beat' ..." Ann Charters, The Portable Beat reader, 1992, ISBN 0-670-83885-3, ISBN 978-0-670-83885-1.
  12. ↑ "Hebert Huncke picked up the word [beat] from his show business friends on the Near North Side of Chicago, and in the fall of 1945 he introduced the word to William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac." Steven Watson, "The Birth of the Beat Generation" (1995), p. 3, ISBN 0-375-70153-2.
  13. ↑ The exuberance is much stronger in the published On the Road, than in its manuscript (in scroll-form). Lucy Sante: "In the scroll the use of the word "holy" must be 80 percent less than in the novel, and psalmodic references to the author's unique generation are down by at least two-thirds; uses of the word "beat", for that matter, clearly favor the exhausted over the beatific." New York Times Book Review, August 19, 2007.
  14. ↑ Ginsberg, A. (1995) Prologue. In Phillips, L (Ed), Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965. (p. 18). Flammarion.
  15. ↑ Beard, Rick, and Leslie Berlowitz. 1993. Greenwich Village: Culture and Counterculture. New Brunswick, N.J. Published for the Museum of the City of New York by Rutgers University Press. 167.
  16. ↑ "In this essay "Beat" includes those American poets considered avant-garde or anti-academic from c. 1955 – 1965.", Lee Hudson, "Poetics in Performance: The Beat Generation" collected in Studies in interpretation, Volume 2, ed Esther M. Doyle, Virginia Hastings Floyd, 1977, Rodopi, ISBN 90-6203-070-X, 9789062030705, p. 59.
  17. ↑ "... resistance is bound to occur in bringing into the academy such anti-academic writers as the Beats.", Nancy McCampbell Grace, Ronna Johnson, Breaking the rule of cool: interviewing and reading women beat writers, 2004, Univ. Press of Mississippi, ISBN 1-57806-654-9, ISBN 978-1-57806-654-4, p. x.
  18. ↑ "The Black Mountain school originated at the sometime Black Mountain College of Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1950s and gave rise to an anti-academic academy that was the center of attraction for many of the disaffiliated writers of the period, including many who were known in other contexts as the Beats or the Beat generation and the San Francisco school." Steven R. Serafin, Alfred Bendixen, The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature, 2005, Continuum International Publishing Group, ISBN 0-8264-1777-9, ISBN 978-0-8264-1777-0, p. 901.
  19. ↑ Genter, Robert (2004). ""I'm Not His Father": Lionel Trilling, Allen Ginsberg, and the Contours of Literary Modernism". College Literature. 31 (2): 22–52. doi:10.1353/lit.2004.0019. JSTOR 25115190. S2CID 171033733.
  20. ↑ "Curious About Columbia?". c250.columbia.edu. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
  21. ↑ McDarrah, Fred W., and Gloria S. McDarrah. 1996. Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village. New York: Schirmer Books.
  22. 1 2 Beard and Berlowitz. 1993. Greenwich Village. "The Beat Generation in the Village." 165–198.
  23. ↑ Beard and Berlowitz. 1993. Greenwich Village. "The Beat Generation in the Village." 170.
  24. ↑ Beard and Berlowitz. 1993. Greenwich Village. "The Beat Generation in the Village." 178.
  25. ↑ "Beat Party Nominates Anti-Presidential Choice". July 21, 1960.
  26. ↑ "Anti-Presidential Nominee Named on 5th Beat Ballot". July 21, 1960.
  27. ↑ Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation: "Wally Hedrick, a painter and veteran of the Korean War, approached Ginsberg in the summer of 1955 and asked him to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery... At first, Ginsberg refused. But once he'd written a rough draft of Howl, he changed his 'fucking mind,' as he put it."
  28. ↑ Wills, David S. (October 7, 2015). "Sixty Years After the Six Gallery Reading". Beatdom. Retrieved June 10, 2024.
  29. ↑ Ginsberg, Allen. "Howl". 1986 critical edition edited by Barry Miles, Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts & Bibliography ISBN 0-06-092611-2 (pbk.)
  30. ↑ McClure, Michael. Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac. Penguin, 1994. ISBN 0-14-023252-4.
  31. ↑ Smith, Mike (November 7, 2013). "Adaptation And The Environmental Beat: Poet-Activist Gary Snyder Lands In Albuquerque | Weekly Alibi". Retrieved June 10, 2024.
  32. ↑ Bradley J. Stiles, Emerson's contemporaries and Kerouac's crowd: a problem of self-location, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-8386-3960-7, ISBN 978-0-8386-3960-3, p. 87: "Although Kerouac did not introduce Eastern religion into American culture, his writings were instrumental in popularizing Buddhism among mainstream intellectuals."
  33. ↑ Schneider, D. (2015). Crowded by beauty: the life and Zen of poet Philip Whalen. (p. xv) University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520960992
  34. ↑ "Reed Magazine: When the Beats Came Back (1/6)". reed.edu. Archived from the original on November 14, 2020. Retrieved November 30, 2014.
  35. ↑ "Reed Digital Collections : Search Results". cdm.reed.edu. Retrieved November 30, 2014.
  36. ↑ Solnit, Rebecca (1995). "Heretical Constellations: Notes on California, 1946-61". In Phillips, Lisa (ed.). Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1965. Whitney Museum of American Art. p. 69. ISBN 978-2-08-013613-8.
  37. ↑ Solnit, Rebecca (1995). "Heretical Constellations: Notes on California, 1946-61". In Phillips, Lisa (ed.). Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1965. Whitney Museum of American Art. p. 76. ISBN 978-2-08-013613-8.
  38. ↑ Solnit, Rebecca (1995). "Heretical Constellations: Notes on California, 1946-61". In Phillips, Lisa (ed.). Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1965. Whitney Museum of American Art. p. 81. ISBN 978-2-08-013613-8.
  39. ↑ Phillips, Lisa, ed. (1995). Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1965. Whitney Museum of American Art. p. 38. ISBN 978-2-08-013613-8.
  40. ↑ Phillips, Lisa, ed. (1995). Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1965. Whitney Museum of American Art. p. 37. ISBN 978-2-08-013613-8.
  41. 1 2 Raskin, J. (2004). American scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. (p.53). University of California Press.
  42. ↑ F, Paton. (2016). Angel Tendencies and Gratuitous Acts: Kill Your Darlings and the Legacy of Lucien Carr. In Geis, D. Brater, E. Taylor-Batty, M. (Eds). Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the 'Howl' Generation. (pp.327-343). Bloomsbury.
  43. ↑ Knight, Brenda, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution, 978-1573241380, Conari Press, 1998.
  44. 1 2 Kakutani, Michiko (November 10, 2008). "A Jack Kerouac-William S. Burroughs Collaboration: 'And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks'". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved September 12, 2017.
  45. 1 2 3 4 5 Raskin, J. (2004). American scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. University of California Press.
  46. ↑ Raskin, J. (2004). American scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. (pp.53-54). University of California Press.
  47. ↑ Raskin, J. (2004). American scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. University of California Press.
  48. ↑ Hadda, J. (2008). Ginsberg in Hospital. American Imago, 65(2), 229–259. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26305281
  49. 1 2 3 Petrus, Stephen (1997). "Rumblings of Discontent: American Popular Culture and its Response to the Beat Generation, 1957-1960". Studies in Popular Culture. 20 (1). Popular Culture Association in the South: 2–6. ISSN 0888-5753.
  50. ↑ Morgan, Literary Outlaw (1988), pp. 163–165.
  51. ↑ Morgan, Literary Outlaw (1988), pp. 205–206.
  52. ↑ Nesbitt, W. (2016) William S. Burroughs and the Shooting of Joan Vollmer Burroughs as Performance. In Geis, D. Brater, E. Taylor-Batty, M. (Eds). Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the "Howl" Generation. (pp.63-70). Bloomsbury.
  53. ↑ Ward, G. (1993). William Burroughs: A literary outlaw? The Cambridge Quarterly, 22(4), 339–354. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42967287
  54. ↑ Bisbort, A. (2010). Beatniks: A guide to an American Subculture. (p.91). Greenwood Press.
  55. ↑ Burroughs, W. S. (2010). Queer. (p.2) Penguin.
  56. ↑ Burroughs, W. S. (2010). Queer. (p.2) Penguin.
  57. ↑ See, Raven J (2016). "Fashion and female beat identity in the writing of di Prima, Johnson, and Jones". CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. 18 (5) 16. Purdue University Press: 3. doi:10.7771/1481-4374.2905 – via Purdue University.
  58. ↑ Mortenson, Erik (2010). Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence. SIU Press. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-8093-8613-0.
  59. ↑ "Interview with Robert Creeley" (PDF). Journal of American Studies of Turkey. 27: 73–81. 2008. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 28, 2012. Retrieved 2011-10-10. TV interview 1982 poets Hedwig Gorski and Robert Creeley discuss Beats. Special Robert Creeley issue, Turkey.
  60. ↑ Interview 2013 by Greece Blues site Michalis Limnios BLUES @ GREECE.
  61. ↑ Friedman, Amy L (1998). ""Being here as hard as I could:" The Beat Generation Women Writers". Discourse. 20 (1/2): 229–244. JSTOR 41389884 – via JSTOR.
  62. ↑ Norton, Sophie (2021). "Poetry Is In The Streets: Lessons From The Beat Generation". Norman Rea Gallery.
  63. 1 2 Mortenson, Erik (2010). Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence. SIU Press. pp. 35–36. ISBN 978-0-8093-8613-0.
  64. ↑ Stimpson, Catherine R (1983). "The Beat Generation And The Trials Of Homosexual Liberation". Salmagundi (58/59): 378–379. JSTOR 40547579 – via JSTOR.
  65. ↑ Lisa Saloy, M. (1995) Black Beats and Black Issues. In Phillips, L (Ed), Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965. (p.154). Flammarion.
  66. 1 2 Lisa Saloy, M. (1995) Black Beats and Black Issues. In Phillips, L (Ed), Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965. (pp.153-165). Flammarion.
  67. ↑ Lisa Saloy, M. (1995) Black Beats and Black Issues. In Phillips, L (Ed), Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965. (p.158). Flammarion.
  68. 1 2 3 Bisbort, A. (2010). Beatniks: A guide to an American Subculture. Greenwood Press.
  69. ↑ Phillips, L. (1995) Beat Culture: America Revisioned. In Phillips, L (Ed), Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965. (pp. 23-40). Flammarion.
  70. ↑ Lisa Saloy, M. (1995) Black Beats and Black Issues. In Phillips, L (Ed), Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965. (pp.153-165). Flammarion.
  71. ↑ Hernandez, R. (2002). Between Black, Brown & Beige: Latino Poets and the Legacy of Bob Kaufman. Callaloo, 25(1), 190–196. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3300407
  72. ↑ Winans, A. D. (2000). Bob Kaufman. The American Poetry Review, 29(3), 19–20. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27783404
  73. ↑ Lisa Saloy, M. (1995) Black Beats and Black Issues. In Phillips, L (Ed), Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965. (pp.163). Flammarion.
  74. ↑ Friedman, A. L. (1998). 'Being here as hard as I could:' The Beat Generation Women Writers. Discourse, 20(1/2), 229–244. https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/41389884
  75. ↑ Morgan, Bill (2011). The Type Writer Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.
  76. 1 2 Prothero, Stephen (1991). "On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest". The Harvard Theological Review. 84 (2): 205–222. doi:10.1017/S0017816000008166. S2CID 162913767.
  77. ↑ Hemmer, Kurt, ed. (2007). Encyclopedia of Beat Literature. Facts On File, Inc. p. 111. ISBN 978-0-8160-4297-5. These early books, too, are windows into the poet's efforts to find a place for his homosexual identity in the repressive pre-Stonewall United States.
  78. ↑ Hemmer, Kurt, ed. (2007). Encyclopedia of Beat Literature. Facts On File, Inc. p. 32. ISBN 978-0-8160-4297-5. And then, before the end of the decade, Burroughs had gone—leaving cold-war America to escape his criminalization as a homosexual and drug addict, to begin 25 years of expatriation.
  79. ↑ Mortenson, Erik (2010). Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence. SIU Press. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-8093-8613-0.
  80. ↑ "Mrs. America: Women's Roles in the 1950s". PBS American Experience. 2003.
  81. ↑ Lundberg, John (October 16, 2011). "The Great Drug-Induced Poems". Huffington Post. Retrieved September 12, 2017.
  82. ↑ Allen Ginsberg, The Essential Ginsberg, Penguin UK, 2015.
  83. ↑ "Substance Use". Beatdom. September 14, 2010. Retrieved September 12, 2017.
  84. ↑ Saloy, Mona L (2005). "When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead: The Poetry of Bob Kaufman" – via Louisiana State University Press.
  85. ↑ Douglas, Ann (September 2013). "Holy Fools: The Beat Generation and the Cold War". Reviews in American History. 41 (3): 525–532. doi:10.1353/rah.2013.0062.
  86. ↑ Gallagher, Sara (September 2014). ""LEARNING TO BE MAD, IN A DREAM": THE COLD WAR AND THE BIRTH OF THE BEAT GENERATION" (PDF). English (Public Texts) M.A. Graduate Program: 2.
  87. ↑ Douglas, Ann (September 2013). "Holy Fools: The Beat Generation and the Cold War". Reviews in American History. 41 (3): 526. doi:10.1353/rah.2013.0062.
  88. ↑ Douglas, Ann (September 2013). "Holy Fools: The Beat Generation and the Cold War". Reviews in American History. 41 (3): 526. doi:10.1353/rah.2013.0062.
  89. ↑ "Hedonism | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary". Cambridge Dictionary. Retrieved October 26, 2026.
  90. ↑ McClure, Michael. Scratching the Beat Surface.
  91. ↑ "Throughout these interviews [in Spontaneous Mind] Ginsberg returns to his high praise of William Blake and Walt Whitman. Ginsberg obviously loves Blake the visionary and Whitman the democratic sensualist, and indeed Ginsberg's literary personality can be construed as a union of these forces." Edmund White, Arts and letters (2004), p. 104, ISBN 1-57344-195-3, ISBN 978-1-57344-195-7.
  92. ↑ "Ginsberg's intense relationship with Blake can be traced to a seemingly mystical experience he had during the summer of 1948." ibid, p. 104.
  93. ↑ admin (January 5, 2012). "Louis Ginsberg Guests In Allen's 1975 NAROPA Class - part two - (Vachel Lindsay & John Keats)". The Allen Ginsberg Project. Retrieved January 4, 2026.
  94. ↑ Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw (1988), p.36-37 of trade paper edition, "When Billy [William Burroughs] was thirteen, he came across a book that would have an enormous impact on his life and work. Written by someone calling himself Jack Black, You Can't Win was the memoir of a professional thief and drug addict."
  95. ↑ According to William Lawlor: "André Breton, the founder of surrealism and Joans's [sic] mentor and friend, famously called Joans the 'only Afro-American surrealist' (qtd. by James Miller in _Dictionary of Literary Biography_ 16: 268)", p. 159, Beat culture: lifestyles, icons, and impact, ABC-CLIO, 2005, ISBN 1-85109-400-8, ISBN 978-1-85109-400-4. Ted Joans said, "The late André Breton the founder of surrealism said that I was the only Afro-American surrealist and welcomed me to the exclusive surrealist group in Paris", p. 102, For Malcolm: poems on the life and the death of Malcolm X, Dudley Randall and Margaret G. Burroughs, eds, Broadside Press, Detroit, 1967. There is some question about how familiar Breton was with Afro-American literature: "If it is true that the late André Breton, a founder of the surrealist movement, considered Ted Joans the only Afro-American surrealist, he had not read Kaufman; at any rate, Breton had much to learn about Afro-American poetry." Bernard W. Bell, "The Debt to Black Music", Black World/Negro Digest March 1973, p. 86.
  96. ↑ Allen Ginsberg commented: "His interest in techniques of surreal composition notoriously antedates mine and surpasses my practice ... I authoritatively declare Lamantia an American original, soothsayer even as Poe, genius in the language of Whitman, native companion and teacher to myself." Allen Ginsberg, Bill Morgan, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952–1995, p. 442, "Philip Lamantia, Lamantia As Forerunner", HarperCollins, 2001, ISBN 9780060930813.
  97. ↑ Miles (2001) Ginsberg.
  98. ↑ "In 'Author's Introduction,' which is included in Lonesome Traveler (1960), Kerouac ... goes on to mention Jack London, William Saroyan, and Ernest Hemingway as early influences and mentions Thomas Wolfe as a subsequent influence." William Lawlor, Beat culture: lifestyles, icons, and impact, 2005, ISBN 1-85109-400-8, ISBN 978-1-85109-400-4 p. 153. "And if one considers The Legend of Dulouz, one must acknowledge the influence of Marcel Proust. Like Proust, Kerouac makes his powerful memory the source of much of his writing and again like Proust, Kerouac envisions his life's literary output as one great book." Lawlor, p. 154.
  99. ↑ Garton-Gundling, Kyle. "Beat Buddhism and American freedom". thefreelibrary.com. Johns Hopkins University Press. Archived from the original on December 26, 2020. Retrieved May 11, 2019.
  100. ↑ Hill, R. A. (2022). Counterculture of the 1960s. Salem Press Encyclopedia.
  101. ↑ Ginsberg, Allen A Definition of the Beat Generation, from Friction, 1 (Winter 1982), revised for Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965.
  102. ↑ Herb Caen (February 6, 1997). "Pocketful of Notes". San Francisco Chronicle. sfgate.com. Archived from the original on November 14, 2002. Retrieved January 30, 2010. "...Look magazine, preparing a picture spread on S.F.'s Beat Generation (oh, no, not AGAIN!), hosted a party in a No. Beach house for 50 Beatniks, and by the time word got around the sour grapevine, over 250 bearded cats and kits were on hand, slopping up Mike Cowles' free booze. They're only Beat, know, when it comes to work ..."
  103. ↑ William T. Lawlor (ed.), Beat Culture: Lifestyles, Icons and Impact, p. 309.
  104. ↑ Arthur and Kit Knight (ed.), The Beat Vision, New York: Paragon House, 1987, p. 281.
  105. ↑ Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile.
  106. ↑ "Tracing his definition of the term Beat to the fulfillments offered by beatitude, Kerouac scorned sensationalistic phrases like 'Beat mutiny' and 'Beat insurrection,' which were being repeated ad nauseam in media accounts. 'Being a Catholic,' he told conservative journalist William F. Buckley, Jr. in a late-sixties television appearance, 'I believe in order, tenderness, and piety,'" David Sterritt, Screening the Beats: media culture and the Beat sensibility, 2004, p. 25, ISBN 0-8093-2563-2, ISBN 978-0-8093-2563-4.
  107. ↑ Ed Sanders said in an interview in the film The Source (1999) (at the 1hr 17secs point) that he observed the change immediately after the 1967 Human Be-In event: "And right after the Be-In all of a sudden you were no longer a beatnik, you were a hippie." Similar remarks by Sanders: an interview with Jessa Piaia in SQUAWK Magazine, Issue #55, commented: "I've begun Tales of Beatnik Glory, Volume 3. Set in the Hippie era, it defines that delicate time when reporters no longer called us 'Beatnik,' but started to call us 'Hippie.'", https://www.angelfire.com/music/squawk/eds2.html; "There was a big article January of 1966, on page one of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, under the heading 'Beatnik Leader Wants Marijuana.' It was just before "hippie" replaced 'Beatnik.'" Ed Sanders, Larry Smith, Ingrid Swanberg, D.A. Levy & the mimeograph revolution (2007).
  108. ↑ Gore Vidal quotes Ginsberg speaking of Kerouac: "'You know around 1968, when we were all protesting the Vietnam War, Jack wrote me that the war was just an excuse for 'you Jews to be spiteful again.'" Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir, 1995, ISBN 0-679-44038-0.
  109. ↑ For example, see the meaning of "cool" as explained in the Del Close, John Brant spoken word album How to Speak Hip from 1959.
  110. ↑ Allen Ginsberg comments on this in the film "The Source" (1999); Gary Snyder discusses the issue in a 1974 interview, collected in The Beat Vision (1987), Paragon House. ISBN 0-913729-40-X; ISBN 0-913729-41-8 (pbk), edited by Arthur Winfield Knight: "... the next key point was Castro taking over Cuba. The apolitical quality of Beat's thought changed with that. It sparked quite a discussion and quite a dialogue; many people had been basic pacifists with considerable disillusion with Marxian revolutionary rhetoric. At the time of Castro's victory, it had to be rethought again. Here was a revolution that had used violence and that was a good thing. Many people abandoned the pacifist position at that time or at least began to give more thought to it. In any case, many people began to look to politics again as having possibilities. From that follows, at least on some levels, the beginning of civil rights activism, which leads through our one whole chain of events: the Movement.

    We had little confidence in our power to make any long-range or significant changes. That was the 50s, you see. It seemed that bleak. So our choices seemed entirely personal existential lifetime choices that there was no guarantee that we would have any audience, or anybody would listen to us; but it was a moral decision, a moral poetic decision. Then Castro changed things, then Martin Luther King changed things ..."
  111. ↑ Pynchon, Thomas. Slow Learner. Vintage Classics, 2007. ISBN 0-09-953251-4.
  112. ↑ "Sterling also identifies [in Mirroshades (1986)] postmodernist authors Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs as forerunners of cyberpunk." Keith Booker, Anne-Marie Thomas, The Science Fiction Handbook, 2009, p. 111, ISBN 1-4051-6205-8, ISBN 978-1-4051-6205-0.
  113. ↑ "... it should hardly be surprising that to discover that the work of William S Burroughs had a profound impact on both punk music and cyberpunk science fiction." Larry McCaffery, Storming the reality studio: a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern science fiction, 1991, p. 305.
  114. ↑ "Cyberpunk writers acknowledge their literary debt to Burroughs and Pynchon, as well as to New Wave writers from the 1960s and 1970s such as J. G. Ballard and Samuel Delany.", Jenny Wolmark, Aliens and others: science fiction, feminism, and postmodernism, 1994, ISBN 0-87745-447-7, ISBN 978-0-87745-447-2.
  115. ↑ "(LeRoi Jones) ... is best known as a major cultural leader, one of the African American writers who galvanized a second Black Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s ..." – page xi, "Preface", Komozi Woodard, A nation within a nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black power politics (1999, UNC Press), ISBN 0-8078-4761-5, ISBN 978-0-8078-4761-9.
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  117. ↑ "During the eighties, Ginsberg used his position as director of the writing department at Naropa, introduced his classes to the wide range of literature of the Beat Generation. Many of his students became poets and educators and are grouped under an entirely new category that has been labeled Postbeat Poets." Bill Morgan, William Morgan, The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, 2010, p. 245, ISBN 1-4165-9242-3, ISBN 978-1-4165-9242-6.
  118. ↑ "... the name Beatles comes from 'Beat' ..." Regina Weinreich, "Books: The Birth of the Beat Generation", The Sunday New York Times Book Review, January 11, 1996; a review of Steven Watson's THE BIRTH OF THE BEAT GENERATION: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters 1944–1960.
  119. ↑ Ellis Amburn describes a telephone conversation with Jack Kerouac: "John Lennon subsequently contacted Kerouac, revealing that the band's name was derived from 'Beat.' 'He was sorry he hadn't come to see me when they played Queens,' Kerouac said, referring to the Beatles Shea Stadium concert in 1965." Amburn, Ellis, Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac, p. 342, ISBN 0-312-20677-1.
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  123. ↑ " As Ray Manzarek recalls when Morrison was studying at UCLA: 'He certainly had a substantial investment in books. They filled an entire wall of his apartment. His reading was very eclectic. It was typical of the early- to mid-sixties hipster student. [...] And lots of Beatniks. We wanted to _be_ beatniks. But we were too young. We came a little too late, but we were worshippers of the Beat Generation. All the Beat writers filled Morrison's shelves [...]' (Manzarek 1999, 77)" Sheila Whiteley, Too much too young: popular music, age and gender (2005, Routledge)
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  131. ↑ "The next video, Last Night on Earth was shot in Kansas City, with beat author William S. Burroughs making a cameo." p. 96 David Kootnikoff, U2: A Musical Biography (2010) ISBN 0-313-36523-7, ISBN 978-0-313-36523-2.
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  133. ↑ Palmer, Robert (July 14, 1982). "The Pop Life". The New York Times. Retrieved February 22, 2021.
  134. ↑ Collected in The Norman Podhoretz Reader by Norman Podhoretz, Thomas L. Jeffers, Paul Johnson. Free Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-4165-6830-8.
  135. ↑ In: Spontaneous Mind.
  136. ↑ Ginsberg, Allen, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958–1996, p. 5, ISBN 0-06-093082-9.
  137. ↑ Knight, Arthur Winfield. Ed. The Beat Vision (1987), Paragon House. ISBN 0-913729-40-X; ISBN 0-913729-41-8 (pbk).
  138. ↑ Charters (2001) Beat Down to Your Soul.
  139. ↑ Martinez, Manuel Luis (2003). Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 52. ISBN 9780299192839.
  140. ↑ Lerner, Richard and Lewis MacAdams, directors "What Ever Happened to Kerouac?" (1985).
  141. ↑ Burns, Glen Great Poets Howl: A Study of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry, 1943–1955, ISBN 3-8204-7761-6.

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