Beat generation
Encyclopedia
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired. Central elements of "Beat" culture included experimentation with drugs, alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern religion
, a rejection of materialism
, and the idealizing of exuberant, unexpurgated means of expression and being.
Allen Ginsberg
's Howl
(1956
), William S. Burroughs
's 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 original "Beat Generation" writers met in New York. Later, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs) ended up together in San Francisco in the mid-1950s where they met and became friends with figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance
.
In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the Hippie
counterculture
.
introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948 to characterize a perceived underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York. The name arose in a conversation with writer John Clellon Holmes
. The adjective "beat" could colloquially mean "tired" or "beaten down", but Kerouac expanded the meaning to include the connotations "upbeat," "beatific," and the musical association of being "on the beat".
, Ginsberg
, Lucien Carr
, Hal Chase and others. 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 Arthur Rimbaud
), to counteract what they perceived as their teachers' conservative, formalistic
literary ideals.
Burroughs
was introduced to the group by an old friend, David Kammerer, who was enamored with Lucien Carr. Carr had befriended freshman Allen 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 13, 1944, Carr killed Kammerer with a Boy Scout knife in Riverside Park
in what he claimed later was self-defense. He waited, then 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 was prosecuted. Kerouac wrote about this incident twice in his own works: once in his first novel, The Town and the City
, and again in one of his last, Vanity of Duluoz
. He wrote a collaboration novel with Burroughs, "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
", concerning the murder.
. Burroughs' guide to the criminal underworld (centered in particular around Times Square
) was small-time criminal and drug-addict Herbert Huncke
. The Beats were drawn to Huncke, who later started to write himself, perceiving he possessed a vital worldly knowledge unavailable to them from their largely middle-class upbringings.
Ginsberg was arrested in 1949. The police attempted to pull over Ginsberg while he was driving with Huncke, his car filled with stolen items Huncke planned to fence. Ginsberg crashed the car while trying to flee. He escaped on foot, but left incriminating notebooks behind. Ginsberg was given the option to plead insanity to avoid a jail term, and was committed for 90 days to Bellevue Hospital, where he met Carl Solomon
.
Carl Solomon was arguably more eccentric than psychotic. A fan of Antonin Artaud
, he indulged in self-consciously "crazy" behavior, like throwing potato salad at a college lecturer on Dada
ism. Solomon was given shock treatments
at Bellevue; this became one of the main themes of Ginsberg's "Howl", which was dedicated to Solomon. Solomon later became the publishing contact who agreed to publish Burroughs' first novel Junky in 1953.
was introduced to the group in 1947, and had a number of significant effects. Cassady became something of a muse to Ginsberg; they had a romantic affair, and Ginsberg became Cassady's personal writing-tutor. Kerouac's road-trips with Cassady in the late 1940s became the focus of his second novel, On the Road
. Cassady's verbal style is one of the sources of the spontaneous, jazz-inspired rapping that later became associated with "beatniks". Cassady impressed the group with the free-flowing style of his letters, and Kerouac cited them as a key influence on his spontaneous prose style.
in 1954 and moved on 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.
Kenneth Rexroth
's apartment became a Friday night literary salon (Ginsberg's mentor William Carlos Williams
, an old friend of Rexroth's, 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, in a sense to bridge generations.
Philip Lamantia
, Michael McClure
, Philip Whalen
, Allen 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", Kerouac's roman à clef
for Gary Snyder. Kerouac was impressed with Snyder and they were close for a number of years. In the spring of 1955 they lived together in Snyder's Mill Valley cabin. 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 The Dharma Bums
, Snyder moved to Japan in 1955, in large measure in order to intensively practice and study Zen Buddhism. He would spend 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 most widely read books.
than the reality. Joan Vollmer
for instance did not write, although she appears as a minor figure in multiple authors' works. She has become legendary as the wife of William S. Burroughs, documented in Kerouac's novels, and killed by Burroughs in a drunken game of William Tell
. Corso and Diane Di Prima, among others, insist that there were female Beats, but that it was more difficult for women to get away with a Bohemian existence in that era.
Notable Beat Generation women who have been published include Joyce Johnson
; Carolyn Cassady
; Hettie Jones
; Joanne Kyger
; Harriet Sohmers Zwerling
; Bonnie Bremser; Diane DiPrima; and Ruth Weiss
, who also made films. Poet Elise Cowen
took her life in 1963. Later, women 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.
, marijuana
, benzedrine
, morphine
, and later psychedelic drug
s including peyote
, yage, and LSD
. Much of this usage was "experimental," in that they were often initially unfamiliar with the effects of these drugs. They were inspired by intellectual interest, as well as simple hedonism
.
The actual results of this "experimentation" can be difficult to determine. Claims that some of these drugs can enhance creativity, insight or productivity were quite common, as is the belief that the drugs in use were a key influence on the social events of the time (see recreational drug use
).
One of the contentious features of Ginsberg's poem Howl for authorities were lines about homosexual sex. William Burroughs' Naked Lunch focuses on drug use, but also contains sexual content. In addition to references to homosexuality, it included explicit descriptions of alternative sexual practices. Both works were prosecuted for obscenity. Victory by the publishers in both cases in effect marked the end of literary censorship in the United States.
In comparison, though considered racy at the time, Kerouac's writings were relatively mild. On the Road mentions Neal Cassady's bisexuality without comment, while Visions of Cody
confronts it. However, the first novel does show Cassady as frankly promiscuous. Kerouac's novels feature an interracial love affair (The Subterraneans
), and group sex (The Dharma Bums
).
worshiped Percy Bysshe Shelley
as a hero and was buried at the foot of Shelley's Grave in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome
. Ginsberg mentions Shelley's Adonais at the beginning of Kaddish, and cites it as a major influence on the composition of one of his most important poems. Michael McClure compared Ginsberg's Howl to Shelley's breakthrough poem Queen Mab.
Ginsberg's most important Romantic influence was William Blake
. Blake was the subject of Ginsberg's self-defining auditory hallucination and revelation in 1948. Ginsberg would study Blake all his life. The first time Michael McClure
met Ginsberg, they talked about Blake: McClure saw him as a revolutionary; Ginsberg saw him as a prophet. John Keats
was also cited as an influence.
, 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 Cailfornia"). Edgar Allan Poe
is occasionally acknowledged, and Ginsberg claimed Emily Dickinson
was an influence on Beat poetry. The novel You Can't Win by Jack Black
had a strong influence on Burroughs.
was still in many ways a vital movement in the 1950s. Carl Solomon introduced the work of Antonin Artaud
to Ginsberg, and the poetry of André Breton
had direct influence on the poem Kaddish. 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 Marcel Duchamp
Ginsberg kissed his shoe and Corso cut off his tie. Other shared Beat interests were Guillaume Apollinaire
, Arthur Rimbaud
and Charles Baudelaire
.
's new classicism, certain modernist poets were major influences on the Beats, including Ezra Pound
, William Carlos Williams
, and H.D.
. Pound was specifically important to Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg.
William Carlos Williams was an influence on many of the Beats, with his encouragement to speak with an American voice instead of imitating the European poetic voice and European forms. When Williams came to Reed College
to give a lecture, then students Snyder, Whalen, and Welch were deeply impressed. Williams was a personal mentor to Ginsberg, both being from Paterson, New Jersey.
Williams published several of Ginsberg's letters to him in his epic poem Paterson and wrote an introduction to two of Ginsberg's books. And many of the Beats (Ginsberg specifically) helped promote Williams' writing. Ferlinghetti's City Lights published a volume of his poetry.
Gertrude Stein
was subject of a book-length study by Lew Welch
. Admitted influences for Kerouac include Marcel Proust
, Ernest Hemingway
and Thomas Wolfe
.
In 1982, Ginsberg published a summary of "the essential effects" of the Beat Generation:
" was coined by Herb Caen
of the San Francisco Chronicle
on 2 April 1958, a portmanteau on 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
s, while free-spirited women wearing black leotards dance.
An early example of the "beatnik stereotype" occurred in Vesuvio's
(a bar in North Beach) 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 to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene, prophetically anticipating similar tours of the Haight-Ashbury district ten 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
. (1959–63)
While some of the original Beats embraced the beatniks, or at least found the parodies humorous (Ginsberg, for example, appreciated the parody in Pogo) others criticized the beatniks as inauthentic posers
. 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.
, 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 60s protest movements as an excuse to be "spiteful"
There were stylistic differences between beatniks and hippies – somber colors, dark shades, and goatees gave way to colorful psychedelic clothing and long hair. The beats were known for "playing it cool" (keeping a low profile) but the hippies became known for "being cool" (displaying their individuality).
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.
(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 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.
Since there was 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 (poet)
, Andy Clausen, David Cope, Eileen Myles
, Eliot Katz, Paul Beatty
, Sapphire (author)
, Lesléa Newman, Jim Cohn
, Sharon Mesmer, Randy Roark, Josh Smith, David Evans.
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 Lennon was a fan of Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg later met and became friends with members of the Beatles. Paul McCartney played guitar on Ginsberg's album Ballad of the Skeletons.
Ginsberg was close friends with Bob Dylan and toured with him on the Rolling Thunder Revue
in 1975. Dylan cites Ginsberg and Kerouac 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". Michael McClure
was also friends with members of The Doors
, at one point touring with keyboardist Ray Manzarek
.
Ginsberg was friends with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters
, a group of which Cassady was a member, which also included members of the Grateful Dead
. In the 1970s, Burroughs was friends with Mick Jagger
, Lou Reed
, and Patti Smith
.
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
.
There was a resurgence of interest in the beats among bands in the 1980s. Ginsberg worked with the Clash
. Burroughs worked with Sonic Youth
, R.E.M.
, Kurt Cobain
, and Ministry
, amongst others. Bono
of U2
cites Burroughs as a major influence, and Burroughs appeared briefly in a U2 video in 1997. Laurie Anderson
featured Burroughs on her 1984 album Mister Heartbreak
and in her 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave
. King Crimson
produced the album Beat
inspired by the Beat Generation.
, 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 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.
Ginsberg responded in a 1958 interview with The Village Voice
, specifically addressing the charge that the Beats destroyed "the distinction between life and literature." "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
."
Eastern religion
This article is about far east and Indian religions. For other eastern religions see: Eastern_world#Eastern_cultureEastern religions refers to religions originating in the Eastern world —India, China, Japan and Southeast Asia —and thus having dissimilarities with Western religions...
, a rejection of materialism
Economic materialism
Materialism is a mindset that views the consumption and acquisition of material goods as positive and desirable. It is often bound up with a value system which regards social status as being intrinsically linked to affluence as well as the perception that happiness can be increased through...
, and the idealizing of exuberant, unexpurgated means of expression and being.
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
's Howl
Howl
"Howl" is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955 and published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems. The poem is considered to be one of the great works of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch...
(1956
1956 in literature
The year 1956 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* Writing under the pseudonym of Emile Ajar, author Romain Gary becomes the only person ever to win the Prix Goncourt twice.*Iris Murdoch marries John Bayley....
), William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
's Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959. The book is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order...
(1959
1959 in literature
The year 1959 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*April 30 - Theatrical première of Bertolt Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards, originally performed on radio in 1932....
) and Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
's On the Road
On the Road
On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. It is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of...
(1957
1957 in literature
The year 1957 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* Lawrence Durrell publishes the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet. The final of the four volumes will be published in 1960....
) are among the best known examples of Beat literature. Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity
Obscenity
An obscenity is any statement or act which strongly offends the prevalent morality of the time, is a profanity, or is otherwise taboo, indecent, abhorrent, or disgusting, or is especially inauspicious...
trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States. The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...
hedonists
Hedonism
Hedonism is a school of thought which argues that pleasure is the only intrinsic good. In very simple terms, a hedonist strives to maximize net pleasure .-Etymology:The name derives from the Greek word for "delight" ....
, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.
The original "Beat Generation" writers met in New York. Later, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs) ended up together in San Francisco in the mid-1950s where they met and became friends with figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance
San Francisco Renaissance
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. However, others The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range...
.
In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the Hippie
Hippie
The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's...
counterculture
Counterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
.
Origin of name
Jack KerouacJack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948 to characterize a perceived underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York. The name arose in a conversation with writer John Clellon Holmes
John Clellon Holmes
John Clellon Holmes , born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, was an author, poet and professor, best known for his 1952 novel Go. Considered the first "Beat" novel, Go depicted events in his life with his friends Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. He was often referred to as the "quiet Beat"...
. The adjective "beat" could colloquially mean "tired" or "beaten down", but Kerouac expanded the meaning to include the connotations "upbeat," "beatific," and the musical association of being "on the beat".
Columbia University
The origins of the Beat Generation can be traced to Columbia University and the meeting of KerouacJack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
, Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, Lucien Carr
Lucien Carr
Lucien Carr was a key member of the original New York City circle of the Beat Generation in the 1940s; later he worked for many years as an editor for United Press International.-Early life:...
, Hal Chase and others. Though the beats are usually regarded as anti-academic,
many of their ideas were formed in response to professors like Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S...
and Mark Van Doren
Mark Van Doren
Mark Van Doren was an American poet, writer and a critic, apart from being a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, and Beat Generation...
. Classmates Carr and Ginsberg discussed the need for a "New Vision" (a term borrowed from Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
), to counteract what they perceived as their teachers' conservative, formalistic
Formalism (literature)
Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar...
literary ideals.
Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
was introduced to the group by an old friend, David Kammerer, who was enamored with Lucien Carr. Carr had befriended freshman Allen Ginsberg and introduced him to Kammerer and Burroughs. Carr also knew Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Parker
Edie Parker
Edie Kerouac-Parker was the author of her memoir, "You'll Be Okay" from the Beat Generation, and the first wife of Jack Kerouac. She and Joan Vollmer shared an apartment on 118th Street in New York City, frequented by many Beats, among them Vollmer's eventual husband William S. Burroughs.Parker...
, through whom Burroughs met Kerouac in 1944.
On August 13, 1944, Carr killed Kammerer with a Boy Scout knife in Riverside Park
Riverside Park (Manhattan)
Riverside Park is a scenic waterfront public park on the Upper West Side of the borough of Manhattan in New York City, operated and maintained by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. The park consists of a narrow four-mile strip of land between the Hudson River and the gently...
in what he claimed later was self-defense. He waited, then dumped the body in the Hudson River
Hudson River
The Hudson is a river that flows from north to south through eastern New York. The highest official source is at Lake Tear of the Clouds, on the slopes of Mount Marcy in the Adirondack Mountains. The river itself officially begins in Henderson Lake in Newcomb, New York...
, 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 was prosecuted. Kerouac wrote about this incident twice in his own works: once in his first novel, The Town and the City
The Town and the City
The Town and the City is a novel by Jack Kerouac, published by Harcourt Brace in 1950. This was the first major work published by Kerouac, who later became famous for his second novel On the Road . Like all of Jack Kerouac's major works, The Town and the City is essentially an autobiographical...
, and again in one of his last, Vanity of Duluoz
Vanity of Duluoz
Vanity of Duluoz is a 1968 semi-autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac . The book describes the adventures of Kerouac's alter ego, Jack Duluoz, covering the period of his life between 1935 and 1946...
. He wrote a collaboration novel with Burroughs, "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is a novel by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. It was written in 1945, a full decade before the two authors became famous as leading figures of the Beat Generation, and remained unpublished for many years....
", concerning the murder.
The Times Square "Underworld"
Burroughs had an interest in criminal behavior and got involved in dealing stolen goods and narcotics. He was soon addicted to opiatesOpium
Opium is the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy . Opium contains up to 12% morphine, an alkaloid, which is frequently processed chemically to produce heroin for the illegal drug trade. The latex also includes codeine and non-narcotic alkaloids such as papaverine, thebaine and noscapine...
. Burroughs' guide to the criminal underworld (centered in particular around Times Square
Times Square
Times Square is a major commercial intersection in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue and stretching from West 42nd to West 47th Streets...
) was small-time criminal and drug-addict Herbert Huncke
Herbert Huncke
Herbert Edwin Huncke was a writer and poet, and active participant in a number of emerging cultural, social and aesthetic movements of the 20th century in America...
. The Beats were drawn to Huncke, who later started to write himself, perceiving he possessed a vital worldly knowledge unavailable to them from their largely middle-class upbringings.
Ginsberg was arrested in 1949. The police attempted to pull over Ginsberg while he was driving with Huncke, his car filled with stolen items Huncke planned to fence. Ginsberg crashed the car while trying to flee. He escaped on foot, but left incriminating notebooks behind. Ginsberg was given the option to plead insanity to avoid a jail term, and was committed for 90 days to Bellevue Hospital, where he met Carl Solomon
Carl Solomon
Carl Solomon was an American writer.-Biography:Solomon was born in the Bronx of New York City. His father's death in 1939 had a profoundly negative effect on his early life...
.
Carl Solomon was arguably more eccentric than psychotic. A fan of Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
, he indulged in self-consciously "crazy" behavior, like throwing potato salad at a college lecturer on Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
ism. Solomon was given shock treatments
Electroconvulsive therapy
Electroconvulsive therapy , formerly known as electroshock, is a psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in anesthetized patients for therapeutic effect. Its mode of action is unknown...
at Bellevue; this became one of the main themes of Ginsberg's "Howl", which was dedicated to Solomon. Solomon later became the publishing contact who agreed to publish Burroughs' first novel Junky in 1953.
Neal Cassady
Neal CassadyNeal Cassady
Neal Leon Cassady was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. He served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road....
was introduced to the group in 1947, and had a number of significant effects. Cassady became something of a muse to Ginsberg; they had a romantic affair, and Ginsberg became Cassady's personal writing-tutor. Kerouac's road-trips with Cassady in the late 1940s became the focus of his second novel, On the Road
On the Road
On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. It is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of...
. Cassady's verbal style is one of the sources of the spontaneous, jazz-inspired rapping that later became associated with "beatniks". Cassady impressed the group with the free-flowing style of his letters, and Kerouac cited them as a key influence on his spontaneous prose style.
San Francisco and the Six Gallery reading
Allen Ginsberg had visited Neal and Carolyn Cassady in San JoseSan Jose, California
San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...
in 1954 and moved on to San Francisco in August. He fell in love with Peter Orlovsky
Peter Orlovsky
Peter Anton Orlovsky was an American poet.-Life and work:Orlovsky was born in the Lower East Side of New York City, the son of Katherine and Oleg Orlovsky, a Russian immigrant. He was raised in poverty and was forced to drop out of Newtown High School in his senior year so he could support his...
at the end of 1954 and began writing Howl. Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...
, of the new City Lights Bookstore
City Lights Bookstore
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence...
started to publish the City Lights Pocket Poets Series
City Lights Pocket Poets Series
The City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a series of poetry collections published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books of San Francisco since August 1955...
in 1955.
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...
's apartment became a Friday night literary salon (Ginsberg's mentor William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, an old friend of Rexroth's, had given him an introductory letter). When asked by Wally Hedrick
Wally Hedrick
Wally Bill Hedrick was a seminal American artist in the 1950s California counterculture, gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s...
to organize the Six Gallery reading
Six Gallery reading
The Six Gallery reading was a poetry-reading which occurred at the Six Gallery on Friday, October 7, 1955, at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco....
, Ginsberg wanted Rexroth to serve as master of ceremonies, in a sense to bridge generations.
Philip Lamantia
Philip Lamantia
Philip Lamantia was an American poet and lecturer. Lamantia's visionary poems were ecstatic, terror-filled, and erotic which explored the subconscious world of dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life.-Biography:...
, Michael McClure
Michael McClure
Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...
, Philip Whalen
Philip Whalen
Philip Glenn Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.-Biography:...
, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
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
The Dharma Bums
The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The semi-fictional accounts in the novel are based upon events that occurred years after the events of On the Road...
, whose chief protagonist is "Japhy Ryder", Kerouac's roman à clef
Roman à clef
Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...
for Gary Snyder. Kerouac was impressed with Snyder and they were close for a number of years. In the spring of 1955 they lived together in Snyder's Mill Valley cabin. 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
Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...
and Oriental languages. Lawrence Ferlinghetti called him "the Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...
of the Beat Generation."
As documented in the conclusion of the The Dharma Bums
The Dharma Bums
The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The semi-fictional accounts in the novel are based upon events that occurred years after the events of On the Road...
, Snyder moved to Japan in 1955, in large measure in order to intensively practice and study Zen Buddhism. He would spend most of the next 10 years there. Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
is one of the primary subjects of The Dharma Bums, and the book undoubtedly helped to popularize Buddhism in the West
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
and remains one of Kerouac's most widely read books.
Women of the Beat Generation
The female contemporaries of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs were intimately involved in the creation of Beat philosophy and literature, and yet remain markedly absent from the mainstream interpretation of the most important aspects and figures of the movement. Further, the Beat writings of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs often portray female characters in flat, traditional gender roles most typical of an ideal 1950s American housewife. Rather than offering liberation from social norms, Beat culture actually often marginalized and further culturally repressed American women and, more specifically, many of the female writers of the time period. Although women are less acknowledged in histories of the first Beat Generation, the omission may be due more to the period's sexismSexism
Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one's gender that indirectly affect one's abilities in unrelated areas...
than the reality. Joan Vollmer
Joan Vollmer
Joan Vollmer was the most prominent female member of the early Beat Generation circle. While a student at Barnard College she became the roommate of Edie Parker and their apartment became a gathering place for the Beats during the 1940s, where Vollmer was often at the center of marathon, all...
for instance did not write, although she appears as a minor figure in multiple authors' works. She has become legendary as the wife of William S. Burroughs, documented in Kerouac's novels, and killed by Burroughs in a drunken game of William Tell
William Tell
William Tell is a folk hero of Switzerland. His legend is recorded in a late 15th century Swiss chronicle....
. Corso and Diane Di Prima, among others, insist that there were female Beats, but that it was more difficult for women to get away with a Bohemian existence in that era.
Notable Beat Generation women who have been published include Joyce Johnson
Joyce Johnson
Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction who won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir Minor Characters about her relationship with Jack Kerouac.-Personal life:...
; Carolyn Cassady
Carolyn Cassady
Carolyn Elizabeth Robinson Cassady is an American writer associated with the Beat Generation through her marriage to Neal Cassady and her friendships with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other prominent Beat figures...
; Hettie Jones
Hettie Jones
Hettie Jones is best known as the former wife of Amiri Baraka, known as LeRoi Jones at the time of their marriage, but is also a writer herself. They have two children, Kellie and Lisa Jones....
; Joanne Kyger
Joanne Kyger
Joanne Kyger is an American poet. Her poetry is influenced by her practice of Zen Buddhism and her ties to the poets of Black Mountain, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beat generation.-Overview:...
; Harriet Sohmers Zwerling
Harriet Sohmers Zwerling
Harriet Sohmers, later Zwerling , is an American writer and artist's model. She lived in Paris in the 1950s as part of the bohemian expatriate scene centered around James Baldwin, with whom she shared space in a magazine called New Story.She translated a novel by the Marquis de Sade for Maurice...
; Bonnie Bremser; Diane DiPrima; and Ruth Weiss
Ruth Weiss
Ruth F. Weiss, also known as Wèi Lùshī 魏璐诗, was a Jewish-born Austrian-Chinese educator, journalist, and lecturer...
, who also made films. Poet Elise Cowen
Elise Cowen
Elise Nada Cowen was an American poet. She was part of the Beat generation, and was close to Allen Ginsberg, one of the movement's leading figures.-Background:...
took her life in 1963. Later, women emerged who claimed to be strongly influenced by the Beats, including Janine Pommy Vega
Janine Pommy Vega
Janine Pommy Vega was an American poet associated with the Beats.Vega grew up in Union City, New Jersey. At the age of sixteen, inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, she travelled to Manhattan to become involved in the Beat scene there.In 1962, Vega moved to Europe with her husband, painter...
in the 1960s, Patti Smith
Patti Smith
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses....
in the 1970s, and Hedwig Gorski
Hedwig Gorski
Dr. Hedwig Gorski is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as American Futurism...
in the 1980s.
Drug use
The original members of the Beat Generation used a number of different drugs, including alcoholAlcohol
In chemistry, an alcohol is an organic compound in which the hydroxy functional group is bound to a carbon atom. In particular, this carbon center should be saturated, having single bonds to three other atoms....
, marijuana
Cannabis (drug)
Cannabis, also known as marijuana among many other names, refers to any number of preparations of the Cannabis plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug or for medicinal purposes. The English term marijuana comes from the Mexican Spanish word marihuana...
, benzedrine
Benzedrine
Benzedrine is the trade name of the racemic mixture of amphetamine . It was marketed under this brandname in the USA by Smith, Kline & French in the form of inhalers, starting in 1928...
, morphine
Morphine
Morphine is a potent opiate analgesic medication and is considered to be the prototypical opioid. It was first isolated in 1804 by Friedrich Sertürner, first distributed by same in 1817, and first commercially sold by Merck in 1827, which at the time was a single small chemists' shop. It was more...
, and later psychedelic drug
Psychedelic drug
A psychedelic substance is a psychoactive drug whose primary action is to alter cognition and perception. Psychedelics are part of a wider class of psychoactive drugs known as hallucinogens, a class that also includes related substances such as dissociatives and deliriants...
s including peyote
Peyote
Lophophora williamsii , better known by its common name Peyote , is a small, spineless cactus with psychoactive alkaloids, particularly mescaline.It is native to southwestern Texas and Mexico...
, yage, and LSD
LSD
Lysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated LSD or LSD-25, also known as lysergide and colloquially as acid, is a semisynthetic psychedelic drug of the ergoline family, well known for its psychological effects which can include altered thinking processes, closed and open eye visuals, synaesthesia, an...
. Much of this usage was "experimental," in that they were often initially unfamiliar with the effects of these drugs. They were inspired by intellectual interest, as well as simple hedonism
Hedonism
Hedonism is a school of thought which argues that pleasure is the only intrinsic good. In very simple terms, a hedonist strives to maximize net pleasure .-Etymology:The name derives from the Greek word for "delight" ....
.
The actual results of this "experimentation" can be difficult to determine. Claims that some of these drugs can enhance creativity, insight or productivity were quite common, as is the belief that the drugs in use were a key influence on the social events of the time (see recreational drug use
Recreational drug use
Recreational drug use is the use of a drug, usually psychoactive, with the intention of creating or enhancing recreational experience. Such use is controversial, however, often being considered to be also drug abuse, and it is often illegal...
).
Sexuality
Many of the key Beat Generation figures were homosexual or bisexual, some of them quite openly, including two of the most prominent writers (Ginsberg and Burroughs). Many of them met each other through homosexual social connections, specifically David Kammerer's interest in Lucien Carr.One of the contentious features of Ginsberg's poem Howl for authorities were lines about homosexual sex. William Burroughs' Naked Lunch focuses on drug use, but also contains sexual content. In addition to references to homosexuality, it included explicit descriptions of alternative sexual practices. Both works were prosecuted for obscenity. Victory by the publishers in both cases in effect marked the end of literary censorship in the United States.
In comparison, though considered racy at the time, Kerouac's writings were relatively mild. On the Road mentions Neal Cassady's bisexuality without comment, while Visions of Cody
Visions of Cody
Visions of Cody is an experimental novel by Jack Kerouac. It was written in 1951-1952, and though not published in its entirety until 1973, it had by then achieved an underground reputation...
confronts it. However, the first novel does show Cassady as frankly promiscuous. Kerouac's novels feature an interracial love affair (The Subterraneans
The Subterraneans
The Subterraneans is a 1958 novella by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. It is a semi-fictional account of his short romance with an African American woman named Alene Lee in San Francisco in 1953. In the novel she is renamed "Mardou Fox," and described as a carefree spirit who frequents the...
), and group sex (The Dharma Bums
The Dharma Bums
The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The semi-fictional accounts in the novel are based upon events that occurred years after the events of On the Road...
).
Romanticism
Gregory CorsoGregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
worshiped Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...
as a hero and was buried at the foot of Shelley's Grave in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome
Protestant Cemetery, Rome
The Protestant Cemetery , now officially called the Cimitero acattolico and often referred to as the Cimitero degli Inglesi is a cemetery in Rome, located near Porta San Paolo alongside the Pyramid of Cestius, a small-scale Egyptian-style pyramid built in 30 BC as a tomb and later incorporated...
. Ginsberg mentions Shelley's Adonais at the beginning of Kaddish, and cites it as a major influence on the composition of one of his most important poems. Michael McClure compared Ginsberg's Howl to Shelley's breakthrough poem Queen Mab.
Ginsberg's most important Romantic influence was William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
. Blake was the subject of Ginsberg's self-defining auditory hallucination and revelation in 1948. Ginsberg would study Blake all his life. The first time Michael McClure
Michael McClure
Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...
met Ginsberg, they talked about Blake: McClure saw him as a revolutionary; Ginsberg saw him as a prophet. John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
was also cited as an influence.
Early American sources
Important American inspirations for the Beats included Henry David ThoreauHenry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...
, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
, Herman Melville
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....
and especially Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
, who is addressed as the subject of one of Ginsberg's most famous poems ("A Supermarket in Cailfornia"). Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
is occasionally acknowledged, and Ginsberg claimed Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...
was an influence on Beat poetry. The novel You Can't Win by Jack Black
Jack Black (author)
Jack Black, born 1871 in Vancouver but raised from infancy in Missouri, was a late 19th century/early 20th century hobo and professional burglar, living out the dying age of the Wild West. He wrote You Can't Win a memoir or sketched autobiography describing his days on the road and life as an...
had a strong influence on Burroughs.
French Surrealism
SurrealismSurrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
was still in many ways a vital movement in the 1950s. Carl Solomon introduced the work of Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
to Ginsberg, and the poetry of André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
had direct influence on the poem Kaddish. Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
and Ron Padgett
Ron Padgett
Ron Padgett is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School. Bean Spasms, Padget's first collection of poems, was published in 1967 and written with Ted Berrigan...
translated French poetry. Second-generation Beat Ted Joans
Ted Joans
Theodore "Ted" Joans was an American trumpeter, jazz poet and painter.Joans was born in Cairo, Illinois, but not on a riverboat as had been claimed. He earned a degree in fine arts from Indiana University. He later associated with writers of the Beat Generation in Greenwich Village and San Francisco...
was named "the only Afro-American Surrealist" by Breton.
Philip Lamantia
Philip Lamantia
Philip Lamantia was an American poet and lecturer. Lamantia's visionary poems were ecstatic, terror-filled, and erotic which explored the subconscious world of dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life.-Biography:...
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 Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
Ginsberg kissed his shoe and Corso cut off his tie. Other shared Beat interests were Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire
Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....
, Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
and Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
.
Modernism
Though the Beat aesthetic posited itself against T. S. Eliot's creed of strict objectivity and literary modernismModernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
's new classicism, certain modernist poets were major influences on the Beats, including Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, and H.D.
H.D.
H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...
. Pound was specifically important to Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg.
William Carlos Williams was an influence on many of the Beats, with his encouragement to speak with an American voice instead of imitating the European poetic voice and European forms. When Williams came to Reed College
Reed College
Reed College is a private, independent, liberal arts college located in southeast Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus located in Portland's Eastmoreland neighborhood, featuring architecture based on the Tudor-Gothic style, and a forested canyon wilderness...
to give a lecture, then students Snyder, Whalen, and Welch were deeply impressed. Williams was a personal mentor to Ginsberg, both being from Paterson, New Jersey.
Williams published several of Ginsberg's letters to him in his epic poem Paterson and wrote an introduction to two of Ginsberg's books. And many of the Beats (Ginsberg specifically) helped promote Williams' writing. Ferlinghetti's City Lights published a volume of his poetry.
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
was subject of a book-length study by Lew Welch
Lew Welch
Lewis Barrett Welch, Jr. was an American poet associated with the Beat generation of poets, artists, and iconoclasts.Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s...
. Admitted influences for Kerouac include Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
, Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
and Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American novelist of the early 20th century.Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing...
.
Influences on Western culture
While many authors claim to be directly influenced by the Beats, the Beat Generation phenomenon itself has had a pervasive influence on Western culture more broadly.In 1982, Ginsberg published a summary of "the essential effects" of the Beat Generation:
- Spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation," i.e., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism.
- Liberation of the world from censorship
Censorshipthumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
.- Demystification and/or decriminalization of cannabis
CannabisCannabis is a genus of flowering plants that includes three putative species, Cannabis sativa, Cannabis indica, and Cannabis ruderalis. These three taxa are indigenous to Central Asia, and South Asia. Cannabis has long been used for fibre , for seed and seed oils, for medicinal purposes, and as a...
and other drugsDRUGSDestroy Rebuild Until God Shows are an American post-hardcore band formed in 2010. They released their debut self-titled album on February 22, 2011.- Formation :...
.- The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art form, as evidenced by the Beatles
The BeatlesThe Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
, Bob DylanBob DylanBob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
, and other popular musicians influenced in the later fifties and sixties by Beat generation poets' and writers' works.- The spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized early on by Gary Snyder
Gary SnyderGary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
and Michael McClureMichael McClureMichael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...
, the notion of a "Fresh Planet."- Opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in writings of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac.
- Attention to what Kerouac called (after Spengler
Oswald SpenglerOswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West , published in 1918, which puts forth a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations...
) a "second religiousness" developing within an advanced civilization.- Return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy as against state regimentation.
- Respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road: "The Earth is an Indian thing."
"Beatniks"
The term "BeatnikBeatnik
Beatnik was a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s and violent film images, along with a cartoonish depiction of the real-life people and the spiritual quest in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical...
" was coined by Herb Caen
Herb Caen
Herbert Eugene Caen was a Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco journalistwhose daily column of local goings-on, social and political happenings,...
of the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
on 2 April 1958, a portmanteau on 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
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
". Caen's term stuck and became the popular label associated with a new stereotype: the man with a goatee
Goatee
Goatee refers to a style of facial hair incorporating hair on a man’s chin. The exact nature of the style has varied according to time and culture.Traditionally, goatee refers solely to a beard formed by a tuft of hair on the chin...
and beret
Beret
A beret is a soft, round, flat-crowned hat, designated a "cap", usually of woven, hand-knitted wool, crocheted cotton, or wool felt, or acrylic fiber....
reciting nonsensical poetry and playing bongo
Bongo drum
Bongo or bongos are a Cuban percussion instrument consisting of a pair of single-headed, open-ended drums attached to each other. The drums are of different size: the larger drum is called in Spanish the hembra and the smaller the macho...
s, while free-spirited women wearing black leotards dance.
An early example of the "beatnik stereotype" occurred in Vesuvio's
Vesuvio's
Vesuvio Cafe is a historic bar in North Beach, San Francisco, California.It is located at 255 Columbus Avenue across an alley from City Lights Bookstore. It is open every day of the year 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. The bar was founded in 1948 by Henri Lenoir, and was frequented by a number of Beat...
(a bar in North Beach) which employed the artist Wally Hedrick
Wally Hedrick
Wally Bill Hedrick was a seminal American artist in the 1950s California counterculture, gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s...
to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals, creating improvisational drawings and paintings. By 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene, prophetically anticipating similar tours of the Haight-Ashbury district ten 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
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
and sending Ted Joans
Ted Joans
Theodore "Ted" Joans was an American trumpeter, jazz poet and painter.Joans was born in Cairo, Illinois, but not on a riverboat as had been claimed. He earned a degree in fine arts from Indiana University. He later associated with writers of the Beat Generation in Greenwich Village and San Francisco...
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
Maynard G. Krebs
Maynard G. Krebs was the "beatnik" sidekick of the title character in the U.S. television sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis....
in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis is an American sitcom that aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963. The series and some episode scripts were adapted from a 1951 collection of short stories of the same name, written by Max Shulman, that also inspired the 1953 film The Affairs of Dobie Gillis with Debbie...
. (1959–63)
While some of the original Beats embraced the beatniks, or at least found the parodies humorous (Ginsberg, for example, appreciated the parody in Pogo) others criticized the beatniks as inauthentic posers
Poseur (music)
Poseur is a pejorative term, often used in the punk, heavy metal, hip hop and goth subcultures to describe a person who copies the dress, speech, and/or mannerisms of a group or subculture, generally for attaining acceptability within the group or for popularity among various other groups, yet who...
. 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 1950s, aspects of the Beat movement metamorphosed into The Sixties CountercultureCounterculture of the 1960s
The counterculture of the 1960s refers to a cultural movement that mainly developed in the United States and spread throughout much of the western world between 1960 and 1973. The movement gained momentum during the U.S. government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam...
, accompanied by a shift in terminology from "beatnik
Beatnik
Beatnik was a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s and violent film images, along with a cartoonish depiction of the real-life people and the spiritual quest in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical...
" to "hippie
Hippie
The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's...
". 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 60s protest movements as an excuse to be "spiteful"
There were stylistic differences between beatniks and hippies – somber colors, dark shades, and goatees gave way to colorful psychedelic clothing and long hair. The beats were known for "playing it cool" (keeping a low profile) but the hippies became known for "being cool" (displaying their individuality).
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 KeseyKen Kesey
Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a...
(One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a novel written by Ken Kesey. Set in an Oregon asylum, the narrative serves as a study of the institutional process and the human mind, as well as a critique of Behaviorism and a celebration of humanistic principles. Written in 1959, the novel was adapted into a...
). Though they had no direct connection, other writers considered the Beats to be a major influence, including Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
(Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973.The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest...
) and Tom Robbins
Tom Robbins
Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins (born July 22, 1936 is an American author. His best-selling novels are serio-comic, often wildly poetic stories with a strong social and philosophical undercurrent, an irreverent bent, and scenes extrapolated from...
(Even Cowgirls Get the Blues).
William Burroughs is considered a forefather of postmodern literature
Postmodern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact...
; he also inspired the cyberpunk
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life." The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk, and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk," published in 1983...
genre.
One-time Beat writer LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka , formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism...
helped initiate the Black Arts movement.
Since there was focus on live performance among the Beats, many Slam poets have claimed to be influenced by the Beats. Saul Williams
Saul Williams
Saul Stacey Williams is an American poet, writer, actor and musician known for his blend of poetry and alternative hip hop and for his leading role in the 1998 independent film Slam.-Biography:...
, for example, cites Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman , born Robert Garnell Kaufman, was an American Beat poet and surrealist inspired by jazz music. In France, where his poetry had a large following, he was known as the "American Rimbaud."-Biography:...
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
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...
stressed the social-activist legacy of the Beats and created its own body of literature. Known authors are Anne Waldman
Anne Waldman
Anne Waldman is an American poet.Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist....
, Antler (poet)
Antler (poet)
Antler is an American poet who lives in Wisconsin.Among other honors, Antler received the Whitman Prize from the Walt Whitman Association, given to the poet "whose contribution best reveals the continuing presence of Walt Whitman in American poetry," in 1985. Antler also was awarded the Witter...
, Andy Clausen, David Cope, Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles is an American poet who has also worked in fiction, non-fiction, and theater.She won a 2010 Shelley Memorial Award.-Early life and career:...
, Eliot Katz, Paul Beatty
Paul Beatty
Paul Beatty is a contemporary African-American author. Beatty received an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College and an MA in psychology from Boston University. A 1980 graduate of El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, California.In 1990, Paul Beatty was crowned the first ever Grand...
, Sapphire (author)
Sapphire (author)
Sapphire is an American author and performance poet.- Early life :Ramona Lofton was born in Fort Ord, California, one of four children of an Army couple who relocated within the United States and abroad. After a disagreement concerning where the family would settle, her parents separated, with...
, Lesléa Newman, Jim Cohn
Jim Cohn
Jim Cohn is a poet, poetry activist, and spoken word artist in the United States. He was born in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1953. Early poetics and musical influences include Bob Dylan, the subject of a now lost audiotaped for a class project completed in his senior year at Shaker Heights High...
, Sharon Mesmer, Randy Roark, Josh Smith, David Evans.
Rock and pop music
The Beats had a pervasive influence on rock and rollRock and roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...
and popular music, including the Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
, Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
and Jim Morrison
Jim Morrison
James Douglas "Jim" Morrison was an American musician, singer, and poet, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band The Doors...
: the Beatles spelled their name with an "a" partly as a Beat Generation reference,
and Lennon was a fan of Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg later met and became friends with members of the Beatles. Paul McCartney played guitar on Ginsberg's album Ballad of the Skeletons.
Ginsberg was close friends with Bob Dylan and toured with him on the Rolling Thunder Revue
Rolling Thunder Revue
The Rolling Thunder Revue was a famed U.S. concert tour consisting of a traveling caravan of musicians, headed by Bob Dylan, that took place in late 1975 and early 1976; the prevailing theory was that the tour was named after the Native American shaman Rolling Thunder. Others maintained that tour...
in 1975. Dylan cites Ginsberg and Kerouac as major influences.
Jim Morrison cites Kerouac as one of his biggest influences, and fellow Doors
The Doors
The Doors were an American rock band formed in 1965 in Los Angeles, California, with vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore, and guitarist Robby Krieger...
member Ray Manzarek has said "We wanted to be beatniks". Michael McClure
Michael McClure
Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...
was also friends with members of The Doors
The Doors
The Doors were an American rock band formed in 1965 in Los Angeles, California, with vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore, and guitarist Robby Krieger...
, at one point touring with keyboardist Ray Manzarek
Ray Manzarek
Raymond Daniel Manzarek, Jr., better known as Ray Manzarek , is an American musician, singer, producer, film director, writer, co-founder and keyboardist of The Doors from 1965 to 1973, Nite City from 1977–1978 and Manzarek-Krieger since 2001.Manzarek is listed #4 on Digital Dreamdoor's "100...
.
Ginsberg was friends with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters
Merry Pranksters
The Merry Pranksters were a group of people who formed around American author Ken Kesey in 1964 and sometimes lived communally at his homes in California and Oregon...
, a group of which Cassady was a member, which also included members of the Grateful Dead
Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead was an American rock band formed in 1965 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The band was known for its unique and eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, folk, bluegrass, blues, reggae, country, improvisational jazz, psychedelia, and space rock, and for live performances of long...
. In the 1970s, Burroughs was friends with Mick Jagger
Mick Jagger
Sir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger is an English musician, singer and songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist and a founding member of The Rolling Stones....
, Lou Reed
Lou Reed
Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed is an American rock musician, songwriter, and photographer. He is best known as guitarist, vocalist, and principal songwriter of The Velvet Underground, and for his successful solo career, which has spanned several decades...
, and Patti Smith
Patti Smith
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses....
.
British progressive rock
Progressive rock
Progressive rock is a subgenre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of a "mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility." John Covach, in Contemporary Music Review, says that many thought it would not just "succeed the pop of...
band Soft Machine
Soft Machine
Soft Machine were an English rock band from Canterbury, named after the book The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs. They were one of the central bands in the Canterbury scene, and helped pioneer the progressive rock genre...
is named after Burroughs' novel The Soft Machine
The Soft Machine
The Soft Machine is a novel by William S. Burroughs, first published in 1961, two years after his groundbreaking Naked Lunch. It was originally composed using the cut-up and fold-in techniques from manuscripts belonging to The Word Hoard...
.
Singer-songwriter Tom Waits
Tom Waits
Thomas Alan "Tom" Waits is an American singer-songwriter, composer, and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car."...
, 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
Primus (band)
Primus is an American rock band based in San Francisco, California, currently composed of bassist/vocalist Les Claypool, guitarist Larry "Ler" LaLonde and drummer Jay Lane. Primus originally formed in 1984 with Claypool and guitarist Todd Huth, later joined by Lane, though the latter two departed...
. He later collaborated with Burroughs on the theatrical work The Black Rider
The Black Rider
The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets is a self-billed "musical fable" in the avant-garde tradition created through the collaboration of theatre director Robert Wilson, musician Tom Waits, and writer William S. Burroughs. Wilson was largely responsible for the design and direction....
.
There was a resurgence of interest in the beats among bands in the 1980s. Ginsberg worked with the Clash
The Clash
The Clash were an English punk rock band that formed in 1976 as part of the original wave of British punk. Along with punk, their music incorporated elements of reggae, ska, dub, funk, rap, dance, and rockabilly...
. Burroughs worked with Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth is an American alternative rock band from New York City, formed in 1981. The current lineup consists of Thurston Moore , Kim Gordon , Lee Ranaldo , Steve Shelley , and Mark Ibold .In their early career, Sonic Youth was associated with the No Wave art and music scene in New York City...
, R.E.M.
R.E.M.
R.E.M. was an American rock band formed in Athens, Georgia, in 1980 by singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry. One of the first popular alternative rock bands, R.E.M. gained early attention due to Buck's ringing, arpeggiated guitar style and Stipe's...
, Kurt Cobain
Kurt Cobain
Kurt Donald Cobain was an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the grunge band Nirvana...
, and Ministry
Ministry (band)
Ministry is an American industrial metal band founded by lead singer Al Jourgensen in 1981. Originally a synthpop outfit, Ministry changed its style to industrial metal in the late 1980s. Ministry found mainstream success in the early 1990s with its most successful album Psalm 69: The Way to...
, amongst others. Bono
Bono
Paul David Hewson , most commonly known by his stage name Bono , is an Irish singer, musician, and humanitarian best known for being the main vocalist of the Dublin-based rock band U2. Bono was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, and attended Mount Temple Comprehensive School where he met his...
of U2
U2
U2 are an Irish rock band from Dublin. Formed in 1976, the group consists of Bono , The Edge , Adam Clayton , and Larry Mullen, Jr. . U2's early sound was rooted in post-punk but eventually grew to incorporate influences from many genres of popular music...
cites Burroughs as a major influence, and Burroughs appeared briefly in a U2 video in 1997. Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s...
featured Burroughs on her 1984 album Mister Heartbreak
Mister Heartbreak
Mister Heartbreak is the second album by avant-garde artist, singer and composer Laurie Anderson, released in 1984.Considered more mainstream than its predecessor, Big Science, the album's lead track, "Sharkey's Day" formed the basis of a popular music video. Author William S...
and in her 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave
Home of the Brave (1986 film)
Home of the Brave is a 1986 American concert film featuring the music of Laurie Anderson, who also directed the movie. The film's full on-screen title is Home of the Brave: A Film by Laurie Anderson. The performances were filmed at the Park Theater in Union City, NJ during the summer of 1985.The...
. King Crimson
King Crimson
King Crimson are a rock band founded in London, England in 1969. Often categorised as a foundational progressive rock group, the band have incorporated diverse influences and instrumentation during their history...
produced the album Beat
Beat (King Crimson album)
Beat is an album by the British rock band King Crimson, released in 1982.Of King Crimson's thirteen studio albums, this is the only album that does not have a title track, although its title is included in the name of the song "Heartbeat"....
inspired by the Beat Generation.
Criticism
Norman PodhoretzNorman Podhoretz
Norman B. Podhoretz is an American neoconservative pundit and writer for Commentary magazine.-Early life:The son of Julius and Helen Podhoretz, Jewish immigrants from the Central European region of Galicia, Podhoretz was born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn...
, 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 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.
Ginsberg responded in a 1958 interview with The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
, specifically addressing the charge that the Beats destroyed "the distinction between life and literature." "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
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
, Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American novelist of the early 20th century.Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing...
, Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
."
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, responsibilities to bear.
The Beats comment on the Beat Generation
- "The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked."
- - Amiri BarakaAmiri BarakaAmiri Baraka , formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism...
- - Amiri Baraka
- Three writers do not a generation make.
- - Gregory CorsoGregory CorsoGregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
(sometimes also attributed to Gary SnyderGary SnyderGary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
).
- - Gregory Corso
- “Beat means to have all the blather knocked out of you by experience, suddenly seeing things as they are. Beat doesn’t mean a broken spirit, on the contrary, it’s scourged of external blather!”
- - Gregory CorsoGregory CorsoGregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
- - Gregory Corso
- "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 GinsbergAllen GinsbergIrwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
- - Allen Ginsberg
- "John Clellon Holmes... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'"
- - Jack KerouacJack KerouacJean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
- - Jack Kerouac
- "But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back."
- - Jack KerouacJack KerouacJean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
- - Jack Kerouac
Films about the Beat Generation
- Jack Kerouac (wrote), Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie (directed) Pull My DaisyPull My DaisyPull My Daisy is a short film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration...
(1958) - Heart Beat (1980)
- Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdamsLewis MacAdamsLewis MacAdams is an American poet, journalist, political activist, and filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles, California.-Life and work:...
(directed) Whatever Happened To Kerouac? (1986) Documentary. - David Cronenberg (wrote and directed) Naked Lunch (1991)
- Chuck Workman (wrote and directed) The Source (1999)
- Gary WalkowGary Walkow-Filmography:As film director* Crashing * Beat * Notes from Underground * The Trouble with Dick He has no relation to Gary Fialkow.-External links:* - Official website...
(wrote and directed) BeatBeat (2000 film)Beat is 2000 American drama film written and directed by Gary Walkow, concerning the period of writer William S. Burroughs's life that he spent with his wife, the late Joan Vollmer, leading up to her accidental murder in 1951....
(2000) - Allen Ginsberg Live in London (1995)
- HowlHowl (film)First Howl is an upcoming horror film directed by David Flores and written by Clint Morris and stars Parisse Boothe, Eric Stoltz and Kristina Anapau...
(2010)
See also
- Greenwich VillageGreenwich VillageGreenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
- Literary KicksLiterary KicksLiterary Kicks is a website that functions as a digital library of poetry and prose, biography and cultural criticism chiefly focused on Beat Generation writers...
- San Francisco OracleSan Francisco OracleThe Oracle of the City of San Francisco, also known as the San Francisco Oracle, was an underground newspaper published in 12 issues from September 20, 1966, to February 1968 in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of that city...
- Beat SceneBeat SceneBeat Scene is a UK-based magazine dedicated to the work, the history and the cultural influences of the Beat Generation. As well the best known and more obscure Beat novelists and poets this has included artists, musicians filmmakers and publishers...
- Postbeat Poets
Further reading
- Campbell, James. This Is the Beat Generation: New York–San Francisco-Paris. LA: University of California Press, 2001. ISBN 0-520-23033-7
- Cook, Bruce The Beat Generation: The tumultuous '50s movement and its impact on today. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971. ISBN 0-684-12371-1.
- Gifford, Barry and Lawrence LeeJack's Book An Oral Biography Of Jack Kerouac, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978. ISBN 0-312-43942-3
- Gorski, Hedwig. * http://www.ake.hacettepe.edu.tr/Install/JASTFiles/jast27.pdf Robert Creeley 1982 TV Interview with Hedwig Gorski transcript included in special Robert Creeley Issue, Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST), No. 27, Spring 2008.
- Grace, NancyJack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ISBN 1-4039-6850-0
- Hemmer, Kurt ed. Encyclopedia of Beat Literature. Facts on File, 2006. ISBN 0-8160-4297-7
- Hrebeniak, Michael. Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2006.
- Johnson, Ronna C. and Nancy Grace Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation. Rutgers, 2003. ISBN 081353065
- McDarrah, Fred W. and Gloria S. McDarrah. Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village Schirmer Books (September 1996) ISBN 0-8256-7160-4
- McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. NY: DeCapo, 2003. ISBN 0-306-81222-3
- Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs & Corso in Paris, 1957–1963. NY: Grove Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8021-3817-9
- Sargeant, Jack. "Naked Lens: Beat CinemaNaked Lens: Beat CinemaNaked Lens: Beat Cinema is a book by Jack Sargeant about the relationship between Beat culture and underground film. First published by Creation Books in 1997, the book has been subsequently republished in two different English language editions, by Creation Books in 2001 and Soft Skull in 2008...
". NY: Soft Skull, 2009 (third edition) - Sanders, Ed Tales of Beatnik Glory (second edition, 1990) ISBN 0-8065-1172-9
- Theado, Matt (ed.). The Beats: A Literary Reference. NY: Carrol & Graff, 2002. ISBN 0-7867-1099-3
- Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–1960. NY: Pantheon, 1998. ISBN 0-375-70153-2
General Beat Generation pages
- Biographies of Beat Generation writers, artists, & poets
- Beat Generation and Bohemian Culture – the movement at digihitch
- Kerouac Alley – Beat Generation directory
- Beat Generation biographies and historical information
- How Beat Happened by Steve Silberman (the Beat Generation in San Francisco)
- Invisible Empires of Beatitude
Beat tourism pages
- Denver Beat Photo Tour
- Beats In Kansas: The Beat Generation in the Heartland
- From Beatnik to Anarchist, in the town where William S. Burroughs died
- Lowell Celebrates Kerouac!
Photographs
- Beat Generation photographs (starting in 1965) by Larry Keenan
- Photos, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Patti Smith
- 421 W 118th Street Building where Joan Vollmer Adams & Edie Parker lived
- 419 W 115th Street – "The Cragsmoor" another building where Joan Vollmer Adams lived.
- Photos, Neal Cassady Sr. Gravesite
- Photos, Jack Kerouac's Last House, St. Petersburg, FL
- Photos of the Kerouac Gas Station in Longmont, CO
- A Photographic Essay of Beat Generation Landmarks in New York City
- Beat Memories - slideshow by The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...