Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a literary movement of the 1950s that rebelled against societal norms and embraced spontaneity, personal expression, and non-conformity. Writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs were central figures, and their works often explored themes of alienation, spirituality, and the search for meaning in a post-World War II society.
7 Key excerpts on "Beat Generation"
eBook - ePub- Jamie Russell(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Pocket Essentials(Publisher)
...5. The Beat Generation Movement While Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs are the names most often associated with the Beat Generation, they are actually just the most recognisable personalities of a literary and social movement that included many more (less well-known) writers and artists. In the early days of the Beat Generation, around the late-1940s and early-1950s, the movement didn’t extend much further than the friendship of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. But as the media turned the Beats into a social phenomenon, the Beat lifestyle suddenly swept across America’s cities and into the rest of the world. A whole generation of artists, writers and musicians saw their own concerns reflected in the Beat Generation and pledged allegiance to the Beats’ challenge to straight society. The Beats found friends and followers in all walks of the arts. Sadly there’s not space here to list all the musicians, painters, poets and even stand-up comedians who they influenced. But the writers in this chapter are the key members of the Beat movement, the ground troops who acted as muses, fellow artists and political agitators (and sometimes all three). Many of them were there from the start (Herbert Huncke, John Clellon Holmes), while others form a bridge between the Beats and the hippies (Neal Cassady, Alexander Trocchi). Some deserve an honorary mention simply because they were influenced by the Beat movement and often carried the Beatnik flag (Norman Mailer, Hunter S Thompson). Nelson Algren Although not usually mentioned as a member of the Beat Generation, Nelson Algren (1909-1981) deserves credit as one of the few American novelists, pre-Beat, willing to tackle the growing world of post-war subcultures. Born in Chicago, Algren charted the wild side of the concrete jungle in his novels...
eBook - ePubPoetry 101
From Shakespeare and Rupi Kaur to Iambic Pentameter and Blank Verse, Everything You Need to Know about Poetry
- Susan Dalzell(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Adams Media(Publisher)
...Fellow poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti faced trial on obscenity charges for publishing Howl through his City Lights Booksellers and Publishers. The 1957 trial, in which Ferlinghetti was cleared of charges, was covered widely in the media. Ginsberg was one of a number of writers who gained fame from the movement. Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road defined a generation. William S. Burroughs is best known for his 1959 genre-busting novel Naked Lunch. Poets to emerge from the movement included Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Anne Waldman, and Michael McClure. Why Beat ? Jack Kerouac is credited with coming up with the name for the Beat Generation during a conversation between Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes around 1950. Beat can mean “worn out and tired,” which is how his generation felt in their opposition to mainstream society. It can also be a root for beatific, or finding joy in life. The term gained popularity when it was used by Holmes in his November 16, 1952, article in The New York Times Magazine, headlined: “This Is the Beat Generation.” To put it mildly, the Beats were not initially welcomed into the established poetry world. There were many critics who deemed their work unworthy of publication, at best, and completely worthless, at worst. Critics didn’t know what to make of the unstructured, rambling poems and the angry, sexually explicit lyrics. Others found the new voices exciting and cheered the shift from the staid, traditional-style poems that were popular in the 1950s. With time, the Beats were grudgingly accepted, then embraced, and are now widely acknowledged as contributing to an important period in America’s literary development. Their poems were written to be spoken, sometimes almost sung, out loud. By their joyous embrace of performing poetry in public, they helped revive interest in poetry as performance, a trend that continues today...
eBook - ePubText and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll
The Beats and Rock Culture
- Simon Warner(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...5 THE BRITISH BEAT: ROCK, LITERATURE AND THE UK COUNTERCULTURE IN THE 1960S The mark that the Beat Generation writers left on the US at the end of the 1950s is hard to dispute. From the best-sellers lists, which saw Jack Kerouac’s On the Road included for some weeks after the book’s American publication in 1957, to the ructions that surrounded the obscenity claims against Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the subsequent trial in the same year which would catapult an until then little-known poet into the national headlines, the Beats left their thumb-print on the consciousness of their homeland. They were hardly greeted with open arms by the mainstream, probably despised by much of the cultural establishment, but they were present on the radar: on TV chat shows, like that fronted by host and jazz pianist Steve Allen, where Kerouac would read, 1 or on middle-of-the-road, TV situation comedies which might feature a Beat character, 2 a butt of jokes, yes, but a recognised archetype in US homes as one decade moved towards the next. Add to that, the vicarious interest of the weekly news photo magazines like Life 3 in the scenes surrounding those who followed in the wake of these writers – in Greenwich Village and North Beach, San Francisco – and the shorthand coined by Herb Caen – ‘beatnik’ – in a 1958 newspaper article for the San Francisco Chronicle 4 that managed to elide both Beat and Sputnik – a recent arrival in the skies above Earth – and appeared to suggest that this subcultural crew were a terrestrial threat to American values just as the Soviets’ orbiting satellite was an extra-terrestrial one, and we can see that the Beat Generation, while suspected and denigrated by core society, had made an impression. Perhaps then it was little wonder that a rising crowd of young writers and musicians should feel some attachment to this rebel breed and its provocative ideas, this gathering of individuals who challenged the certainties of everyday politics and morality...
eBook - ePubExploring America in the 1950s
Beneath the Formica (Grades 6-8)
- Molly Sandling, Kimberley Chandler(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Teachers may want to review Ginsberg's poems for mature content before assigning them to students. » Read: The New York Times Magazine article "This Is the Beat Generation" by John Clellon Holmes (1952). The article is available at http://www.litkicks.com/Texts/ThisIsBeatGen.html. Key Terms » The Beats: a loosely aligned group of friends and writers who emerged during the 1950s and who were known for documenting and inspiring cultural phenomena characterized by the rejection of established standards, innovations in style, and experimentation in various realms » Lost Generation: those people who transitioned from childhood to adulthood during World War I Learning Experiences Explain to students that during the 1950s, a loosely aligned group of friends and writers emerged that were named "The Beats" by one of their members, Jack Kerouac. Have students read excerpts from Jack Kerouac's (1957, 1958) books On the Road and Dharma Bums and analyze them using the Literature Analysis Model (Handout 7.1). If possible, listen to Kerouac read his work from YouTube. If you have students listen to his readings, ask: What do you notice about how he reads his work? Have students read the two poems by Allen Ginsberg (1955a, 1955b) "America" and "Howl." Have students individually analyze these using the Literature of the Beats sheet (Handout 7.2). Discuss student responses as a whole group...
eBook - ePubFlappers 2 Rappers
American Youth Slang
- Tom Dalzell(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Dover Publications(Publisher)
...Chapter 6 The Beat Counterculture of the 1950s “Like we was up in this freak’s pad, and she came off real lame, because we didn’t dig the TV, you know?” A long with rock and roll, the 1950s produced the first viable youth counterculture (a word not widely used until the late 1960s), a complex combination of four separate components which have come to be remembered collectively as the Beat movement or Beatnik movement, depending on perspective. In its purest sense, the Beat movement was a serious literary movement involving a relatively small group of men who met each other while coming of age in New York in the 1940s, for whom World War II was a formative event, and who achieved their first degree of literary success before the Beat movement in its broader social sense developed. They included Jack Kerouac (The Town and the City, published in 1950, On The Road in 1957), John Clellon Holmes (Go, published in 1952), William S. Burroughs (Junkie, published in 1953), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (City Lights Bookstore, opened in 1953, first poetry published in 1955), and Allen Ginsberg (Howl, published in 1956). With their fellow writers they established a new genre of American literature, heavily influenced by French existentialism, Zen Buddhism, and the hipster’s passion for jazz and life. The second piece of the Beat puzzle is the hipster, the lover of bebop, sartorially stylish, jive-speaking, drug-experimenting, passionate about life, and something of a hustler, powerfully portrayed by Norman Mailer in The White Negro (Dissent, Summer, 1957): “In such places as Greenwich Village, a ménage-à-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.” The hipster was a character type, not a movement, providing the social milieu in which the Beat artists—who for the most part shunned the affected dress and jive speech of the hipsters—operated...
eBook - ePub- Jacob Stratman(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
...Topics included drug experimentation, homosexuality and promiscuity, socialism and radical politics, and Eastern religions. These writers later emigrated to San Francisco where they influenced a new generation of “hippies” and antiestablishment thinkers, artists, and writers. Although the term “beatnik” was said to have been used by a journalist who criticized these poets for their “counterculture,” the term “beat” is often associated with Jack Kerouac as a shortened form of “deadbeats,” “beaten down” or “beatified.” Beyond Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac, many of the important beatniks in New York were William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Neal Cassady. In San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Rexroth were among many who increased the Beat movement. You will recognize a poem from this era because of its open-verse form, its oftentimes objectionable or controversial subject matter, and its use of the confessional first-person voice. Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) On the night of October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, Ginsberg read “Howl” for the first time. This reading ushered in a new era for poetry: one of open-verse, taboo issues, and social protest. Soon after the reading, fellow poet and owner of City Lights Bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, offered to publish the work, later along with several other Ginsberg poems, in his Pocket Poets series. This publication caused such a public outcry that Ferlinghetti was even tried for publishing obscenity. In the introduction, William Carlos Williams writes, “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell” (1959, 8)...
eBook - ePubBeat Feminisms
Aesthetics, Literature, Gender, Activism
- Polina Mackay(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In fact, like Barthes and other mid- to late-twentieth-century writers (e.g. Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation [1981] and Umberto Eco in Travels in Hyperreality [1986]), Beat texts show interest in the symbolic and variable meaning of newly invented signifiers. This interest first becomes apparent in Kerouac’s treatment of “Beat” in 1959 as a kind of arbitrary signifier meaning both “poor, down and out,” extending to refer to a social group that has “a certain new gesture, or attitude … a new more” (“Origins,” 363). John Clellon Holmes also describes Beat as an indeterminable “spiritual quest” (“Philosophy,” 35), while LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) defines it as a multipurpose “reaction against” (“Beat Generation,” 472). Female Beats retrospectively attach a similar variability to the term. ruth weiss, for example, sees the different ways in which the term has been used as responding to particular cultural attitudes towards youth subcultures. She notes in an interview that “Beat and the beatnik were a kind of put-down in the fifties—it was a joke by the media.” But weiss also notes how the term “has come to mean an alternative approach to life away from the materialism that exploded after World War II” (Breaking the Rule of Cool, 59). Similarly, Anne Waldman sees Beat as a way of writing against modernity’s obsession with material culture. She builds on Kerouac’s new “more” and Holmes’ Beat as spiritual experience to define the concept as mystical awakening that starts from the self and extends to the community: “beatitude, beatific, being blessed because you actually get outside your neurotic head and have a kind of satori or epiphany about your own existence in the larger maelstrom” (Breaking the Rule of Cool, 266). Waldman’s description pinpoints the dual interest of the Beats in both the expansion of individual experience and the passing of this new enlightened consciousness onto the wider community of like-minded people...
