Beat Generation

I

Introduction

Beat Generation, group of American writers of the 1950s whose writing expressed profound dissatisfaction with contemporary American society and endorsed an alternative set of values. The term sometimes is used to refer to those who embraced the ideas of these writers. The Beat Generation's best-known figures were writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who met as students at Columbia University in the 1940s, and San Francisco-based poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, in the North Beach section of San Francisco, became a center of Beat culture and remained an enduring symbol of alternative literature into the 1990s. Another center of Beat activity was New York City’s East Village, where Ginsberg made his home.

The term Beat Generation was first used by Kerouac in the late 1940s. The word beat had various connotations for the writers, including despair over the beaten state of the individual in mass society and belief in the beatitude, or blessedness, of the natural world and in the restorative powers of the beat of jazz music and poetry. Beat writing generally called for a renunciation of material goods and acquisitiveness in favor of a rediscovery of the erotic, artistic, and spiritual self through the use of drugs, casual sex, music, and the mysticism of Zen Buddhism. The term beatnik was coined in the late 1950s to refer, often disparagingly, to people who embraced the ideas and attitudes of the Beat writers.

II

Origins and Sources

The society the Beat writers rebelled against was one of economic affluence and social conformity following World War II (1939-1945). Cultural historians point out that acquisition of consumer goods, which had been scarce during wartime, became a central feature of postwar life, driven by the mass media, advertising, and generous loan terms. At the same time television presented an idealization of suburban family life. The Cold War, which pitted the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union and its satellites, allowed for denunciation and even persecution of social dissidents and nonconformists as threats to national security. It was in this climate that a group of writers came forward to declare their alienation from what they saw as the creed of suburban conformity in favor of what Allen Ginsberg called 'the lost America of love.'

The Beat writers found inspiration in a variety of sources, including the work of 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman and the improvisational melodies and rhythms of jazz, especially the bebop style of the 1940s. They looked to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) for both form and content. In that work, Whitman abandoned traditional European verse meters and invented new American rhythms, and he declared the divinity of the individual self. In jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Dexter Gordon, the Beat writers found artists who had broken away from mainstream art forms with original, spontaneous expressions that challenged their audiences emotionally and intellectually. Their music, improvisational by design, was not easily absorbed and packaged by the entertainment industry. The Beats hoped to do as much for American literature.

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Furthermore, many Beat writers, particularly Ginsberg, Kerouac, and poet Gary Snyder, discovered Asian literature while exploring the ideas of Zen Buddhism. Although most of them did not practice Buddhism in any strict sense, they borrowed certain Asian literary forms, including the haiku, a Japanese verse form. They also alluded to satori, the experience of sudden enlightenment, and other aspects of Buddhism in their writing.

III

Beat Writers and Their Works

The first book generally characterized as a Beat Generation work was Go (1952), a novel by John Clellon Holmes about a group of young, disenchanted writers in New York City who closely resembled the Beats. The first discussion of the Beat Generation in a national forum was an article entitled “This is the Beat Generation,” also written by Holmes, which was featured in the Sunday magazine section of the New York Times in November 1952. But it was not until 1956, when the publication of Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl provoked an obscenity trial, that the Beat Generation achieved broad national recognition.

A poem in three sections, Howl is written in free verse, unrhymed lines with no fixed meter. Verging at times on stream of consciousness, the poem appears to follow Ginsberg’s unedited train of thought, its sequence dictated by free association rather than logic. In the poem, Ginsberg likens the sacrifices Americans make in their cultlike worship of material goods to the worship of the pagan deity Moloch, which demanded ritual sacrifice of children. Soon after the publication of Howl, government authorities declared the book obscene and seized it, but in the trial that followed, a judge found the book to have literary merit and ordered its release. Ginsberg’s other important works include the poems Kaddish (1954), “A Supermarket in California” (1955), and “America” (1956).

Perhaps the best-known Beat novel is Kerouac’s semiautobiographical On the Road (1957). The book celebrates direct sensory experience, freedom from conventional responsibilities, and the emotional intensity of a life of hitchhiking, casual sex, and recreational drug use. At the novel’s end, however, the narrator retreats from these excesses, hoping to find the stability necessary for writing. The road stood for an emotional journey as well as for the actual roads the writer traveled. Kerouac went on to write more than a dozen novels and collections of short stories. His other important Beat works include the novel The Dharma Bums (1958) and the collection of poetry Mexico City Blues (1959).

Ferlinghetti, as founder of City Lights Books, an independent press in San Francisco, was responsible for the publication of much Beat poetry, including Howl, in his Pocket Poets Series. The best-known collection of Ferlinghetti’s own poetry, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), is characterized by frank language, vivid imagery, and humor. Other writers associated with the Beat Generation include William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Diane DiPrima, and Paul Bowles.

IV

Impact

The Beats were greeted at first with contempt from establishment intellectuals and with mockery from the mass media. On the Road, completed by Kerouac in 1951, went unpublished until 1957, suffering dozens of rejections from major New York publishing houses. When the novel did appear, a New York Times book review called it “barbaric.” Leading scholars described the lifestyle associated with the Beats as deviant. The stereotype that emerged in the mass media was a spaced-out beatnik, dressed in black, pounding on bongo drums and muttering gibberish as poetry.

Student protest movements of the 1960s heralded a new generation that soon replaced the Beats and their issues. Though tied to the Beats in their rejection of the establishment and enjoyment of marijuana, the youth movement of the 1960s generally favored rock music over jazz and film over literature. The mass media lost interest in the Beats as a new bohemian figure emerged: the hippie.

However, by calling attention to alternative values, ideas, and literary modes, the Beats influenced several writers of the 1960s, including poets Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn, and novelists Ken Kesey and Richard Brautigan. In time a younger generation of intellectuals created a new respect for Beat writing, which eventually found inclusion in college and university curricula. Allen Ginsberg, who was awarded a National Book Award for poetry in 1974, relished his celebrity and became an antiestablishment media hero. Gary Snyder was awarded the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Jack Kerouac, however, became severely depressed and died of alcoholism at age 47.

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