Beat generation. The main representative plan: Introduction

Participants
Women
Beat Generation women who have been published include Edie Parker; Joyce Johnson; Carolyn Cassady; Hettie Jones; Joanne Kyger; Harriet Sohmers Zwerling; Diane DiPrima; Bonnie Bremser; and Ruth Weiss, who also made films. Carolyn Cassady wrote her own detailed account about life with husband Neal Cassady which also included details about her affair with Jack Kerouac. She titled it Off the Road, and it was published in 1990. Poet Elise Cowen took her own life in 1963. Poet Anne Waldman was less influenced by the Beats than by Allen Ginsberg's later turn to Buddhism. Later, female poets emerged who claimed to be strongly influenced by the Beats, including Janine Pommy Vega in the 1960s, Patti Smith in the 1970s, and Hedwig Gorski in the 1980s.
African Americans
Although African Americans were not widely represented in the Beat Generation, the presence of some black writers in this movement did contribute to the movement's progression. While many of the Beats briefly discussed issues of race and sexuality, they spoke from their own perspectives—most being white. However, black people added a counterbalance to this; their work supplied readers with alternative views of occurrences in the world. Beats like the poet Robert "Bob" Kaufman and the writer LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) provide through their work distinctly Black perspectives on the movement. Kaufman wrote about a number of his experiences with the racist institutions of the time. Following his time in the military, he had trouble with police officers and the criminal justice system. Like many of the Beats, Kaufman was also a fan of Jazz and incorporated it into his work to describe relationships with others. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) married Beat writer, Hettie Cohen, who became Hettie Jones, in 1958. Together with Diane di Prima, they worked to develop Yūgen magazine, named for the Japanese concept of yūgen. Mr. and Mrs. Jones were associated with a number of Beats (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso). That is, until the assassination of the Civil Rights leader, Malcolm X. During this time, LeRoi Jones branched off from the other Beat writers, including his wife, to find his identity among the African-American and Islamic communities. The change in his social setting along with awakening influenced his writing and brought about the development of many of his most notable works, like Somebody Blew Up America, in which he reflected on the attacks of 9/11 and America's reaction to this incident in relation to other occurrences in America.
Culture and influences
Sexuality
One of the key beliefs and practices of the Beat Generation was free love and sexual liberation, which strayed from the Christian ideals of American culture at the time. Some Beat writers were openly gay or bisexual, including two of the most prominent (Ginsberg[39] and Burroughs). 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). The relationships among men in Kerouac's novels are predominately homosocial.
Drug use
The original members of the Beat Generation used a number of different drugs, including alcohol, marijuana, benzedrine, morphine, and later psychedelic drugs such as peyote, Ayahuasca, and LSD. They often approached drugs experimentally, initially being unfamiliar with their effects. Their drug use was broadly inspired by intellectual interest, and many Beat writers thought that their drug experiences enhanced creativity, insight, or productivity. The use of drugs was a key influence on many of the social events of the time that were personal to the Beat generation.
Romanticism
Gregory Corso considered English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley a hero, and he was buried at the foot of Shelley's grave in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. Ginsberg mentions Shelley's poem Adonais at the beginning of his poem Kaddish, and cites it as a major influence on the composition of one of his most important poems. Michael McClure compared Ginsberg's Howl to Shelley's breakthrough poem Queen Mab.
Ginsberg's main Romantic influence was William Blake,[46] and studied him throughout his life. Blake was the subject of Ginsberg's self-defining auditory hallucination and revelation in 1948. Romantic poet John Keats was also cited as an influence.
Jazz
Writers of the Beat Generation were heavily influenced by Jazz artists like Billie Holiday and the stories told through Jazz music. Writers like Jack Kerouac (On the Road), Bob Kaufman ("Round About Midnight," "Jazz Chick," and "O-Jazz-O"), and Frank O'Hara ("The Day Lady Died") incorporated the emotions they felt toward Jazz. They used their pieces to discuss feelings, people, and objects they associate with Jazz music, as well as life experiences that reminded them of this style of music. Kaufman's pieces listed above "were intended to be freely improvisational when read with Jazz accompaniment" (Charters 327). He and other writers found inspiration in this genre and allowed it to help fuel the Beat movement⁵.
Early American sources
The Beats were inspired by early American figures such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville and especially Walt Whitman, who is addressed as the subject of one of Ginsberg's most famous poems, A Supermarket in California. Edgar Allan Poe was occasionally acknowledged, and Ginsberg saw Emily Dickinson as having an influence on Beat poetry. The 1926 novel You Can't Win by outlaw author Jack Black was cited as having a strong influence on Burroughs.
French surrealism
In many ways, Surrealism was still considered a vital movement in the 1950s. Carl Solomon introduced the work of French author Antonin Artaud to Ginsberg, and the poetry of André Breton had direct influence on Ginsberg's poem Kaddish.[citation needed] Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, John Ashbery and Ron Padgett translated French poetry. Second-generation Beat Ted Joans was named "the only Afro-American Surrealist" by Breton.
Philip Lamantia introduced Surrealist poetry to the original Beats. The poetry of Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman shows the influence of Surrealist poetry with its dream-like images and its random juxtaposition of dissociated images, and this influence can also be seen in more subtle ways in Ginsberg's poetry. As the legend goes, when meeting French Surrealist Marcel Duchamp, Ginsberg kissed his shoe and Corso cut off his tie. [page needed] Other influential French poets for the Beats were Guillaume Apollinaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire.
Modernism
Gertrude Stein was the subject of a book-length study by Lew Welch. Admitted influences for Kerouac include Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.
Buddhism and Daoism
Gary Snyder defined wild as "whose order has grown from within and is maintained by the force of consensus and custom rather than explicit legislation". "The wild is not brute savagery, but a healthy balance, a self-regulating system.". Snyder attributed wild to Buddhism and Daoism, the interests of some Beats. "Snyder's synthesis uses Buddhist thought to encourage American social activism, relying on both the concept of impermanence and the classically American imperative toward freedom."
Topics
A section devoted to the beat generation at a bookstore in Stockholm, Sweden
While many authors claim to be directly influenced by the Beats, the Beat Generation phenomenon itself has had an influence on American culture leading more broadly to the hippie movements of the 1960s.
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.
Demystification and/or decriminalization of cannabis and other drugs.
The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, 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 by Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, 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) a "second religiousness" developing within an advanced civilization.
Return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy vs. 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"
Main article: Beatnik
The term "Beatnik" was coined by Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 1958, blending the name of the recent Russian satellite Sputnik and Beat Generation. This suggested that beatniks were (1) "far out of the mainstream of society" and (2) "possibly pro-Communist."[55] Caen's term stuck and became the popular label associated with a new stereotype—the man with a goatee and beret reciting nonsensical poetry and playing bongo drums while free-spirited women wearing black leotards dance.[citation needed]
An early example of the "beatnik stereotype" occurred in Vesuvio's (a bar in North Beach, San Francisco) which employed the artist Wally Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals, creating improvisational drawings and paintings. By 1958 tourists who came to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene, prophetically anticipating similar tours of the Haight-Ashbury district 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 (1959–1963).
While some of the original Beats embraced the beatniks, or at least found the parodies humorous (Ginsberg, for example, appreciated the parody in the comic strip Pogo[58]) others criticized the beatniks as inauthentic poseurs. Jack Kerouac feared that the spiritual aspect of his message had been lost and that many were using the Beat Generation as an excuse to be senselessly wild⁶.
"Hippies"
Main article: Hippie
During the 1960s, aspects of the Beat movement metamorphosed into the counterculture of the 1960s, accompanied by a shift in terminology from "beatnik" to "hippie".[60] Many of the original Beats remained active participants, notably Allen Ginsberg, who became a fixture of the anti-war movement. Notably, however, Jack Kerouac broke with Ginsberg and criticized the 1960s politically radical protest movements as an excuse to be "spiteful".
There were stylistic differences between beatniks and hippies—somber colors, dark sunglasses, and goatees gave way to colorful psychedelic clothing and long hair. The Beats were known for "playing it cool" (keeping a low profile).
Beyond style, there were changes in substance: The Beats tended to be essentially apolitical, but the hippies became actively engaged with the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.
Literary legacy
Among the emerging novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, a few were closely connected with Beat writers, most notably Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). Though they had no direct connection, other writers considered the Beats to be a major influence, including Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow) and Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues).
William S. Burroughs is considered a forefather of postmodern literature; he also inspired the cyberpunk genre.
One-time Beat writer LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka helped initiate the Black Arts movement.
As there was 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 Poeticsand later at Brooklyn College stressed the social-activist legacy of the Beats and created its own body of literature. Known authors are Anne Waldman, Antler, Andy Clausen, David Cope, Eileen Myles, Eliot Katz, Paul Beatty, Sapphire, Lesléa Newman, Jim Cohn, Thomas R. Peters, Jr. (poet and owner of beat book shop), Sharon Mesmer, Randy Roark, Josh Smith, David Evans.
Rock and pop music
The Beats had a pervasive influence on rock and roll and popular music, including the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. The Beatles spelled their name with an "a" partly as a Beat Generation reference, and John Lennon was a fan of Jack Kerouac. The Beatles even put Beat writer William S. Burroughs on the cover of their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Ginsberg later met and became friends of members of the Beatles, and Paul McCartney played the drums, guitar, Hammond organ, and maracas on Ginsberg's album Ballad of the Skeletons.
Ginsberg was a close friend of 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." In his book Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, Manzarek also writes "I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed." Michael McClure was also a friend of members of The Doors, at one point touring with Manzarek.
Ginsberg was a friend of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, a group of which Neal Cassady was a member, which also included members of the Grateful Dead. In the 1970s, Burroughs was a friend of Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Patti Smith.
The musical group Steely Dan is named after a steam-powered dildo in Burroughs' Naked Lunch. British progressive rock band Soft Machine is named after Burroughs' novel The Soft Machine.
Singer-songwriter Tom Waits, a Beat fan, wrote "Jack and Neal" about Kerouac and Cassady, and recorded "On the Road" (a song written by Kerouac after finishing the novel) with Primus. He later collaborated with Burroughs on the theatrical work The Black Rider.
Jazz musician/film composer Robert Kraft wrote and released a contemporary homage to Jack Kerouac and Beat Generation aesthetics entitled "Beat Generation" on the 1988 album Quake City.
Musician Mark Sandman, who was the bass guitarist, lead vocalist and a former member of the alternative jazz rock band Morphine, was interested in the Beat Generation and wrote a song called "Kerouac" as a tribute to Jack Kerouac and his personal philosophy and way of life.
The band Aztec Two-Step recorded "The Persecution & Restoration of Dean Moriarty (On the Road)" in 1972.
There was a resurgence of interest in the beats among bands in the 1980s. Ginsberg worked with the Clash and Burroughs worked with Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Kurt Cobain, and Ministry, among others.[citation needed] Bono of U2 cites Burroughs as a major influence,[80][81] and Burroughs appeared briefly in a U2 video in 1997.[82] Post-punk band Joy Division named a song "Interzone" after a collection of stories by Burroughs. Laurie Anderson featured Burroughs on her 1984 album Mister Heartbreak and in her 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave.[citation needed] The band King Crimson produced the album Beat inspired by the Beat Generation.
More recently, American artist Lana Del Rey references the Beat movement and Beat poetry in her 2014 song "Brooklyn Baby".[citation needed]
In 2021, rapper R.A.P. Ferreria released the album Bob's Son: R.A.P. Ferreira in the Garden Level Cafe of the Scallops Hotel, named for Bob Kaufman and containing many references to the work of Kaufman, Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, and other beat poets⁷.
Criticism
The Beat Generation was met with scrutiny and assigned many stereotypes. Several magazines, including Life and Playboy, depicted members of the Beat Generation as nihilists and as unintellectual. This criticism was largely due to the ideological differences between American culture at the time and the Beat Generation, including their Buddhist-inspired beliefs.
Norman Podhoretz, a student at Columbia with Kerouac and Ginsberg, later became a critic of the Beats. His 1958 Partisan Review article "The Know-Nothing Bohemians" was a vehement critique primarily of Kerouac's On the Road and The Subterraneans, as well as Ginsberg's Howl. His central criticism is that the Beat 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". In the interview, he stated that "the bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are 'Intellectuals' and there are intellectuals. Podhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now—Proust, Wolfe, Faulkner, Joyce."
Internal criticism
In a 1974 interview, Gary Snyder comments on the subject of "casualties" of the Beat Generation:
Kerouac was a casualty too. And there were many other casualties that most people have never heard of, but were genuine casualties. Just as, in the 60s, when Allen and I for a period there were almost publicly recommending people to take acid. When I look back on that now I realize there were many casualties, responsibilities to bear.
When the Beats initially set out to "construct" new communities that shirked conformity and traditionalism, they invoked the symbols of the most marginalized ethnic identities of their time. As the reality set in, of racial self-identity lost within the communal constructs of their own making, most of the Beat writers altered their message drastically to acknowledge the social impulse to marginalize the self in the conflict between isolationism and absorption of self by communal instincts seeking belonging. They began to deeply engage with new themes such as the place of the white man in America and declining patriarchal institutions.
The “Beat Generation” is a term used to refer to a group of post-World War II American writers who came to prominence in the 1950s. The collective’s most iconic representatives include Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, but as Amiri Baraka (another figure associated with the movement) once wrote, “The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked.”
A Brief Historical Context
The historical context of the “Beat” movement—its emergence from the post-World War II United States—is essential to consider when approaching Beat literature. The idea that technological and economic “progress” would lead to some form of man-made utopia (associated with the epoch of modernity) sustained what was perhaps a mortal wound when the world witnessed the desecration and desolation of the second global war.
What followed was a sort of existential vacuum (a pervasive sense of emptiness) in which many people (particularly members of the young generation) began to seek meaning beyond traditional values and the mainstream worldview. This gave rise to myriad alternative artistic and intellectual communities, among which the “Beats” are notable.
In many ways, the “Beat” movement was a precursor to the countercultural movements of the 1960s. Members of these two camps shared many of the same ideas: rejection of the traditional family unit, divergence from the established work paradigm, focus on individual freedom, experimentation, and sexual liberation, and a general opposition to the military-industrial “machine” of civilization.
Kerouac’s On the Road
On the Road by Jack Kerouac is considered to be one of the quintessential examples of “Beat” literature, along with Howl by Ginsberg and Naked Lunch by Burroughs. When the book was originally released, the New York Times hailed it as “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and whose principal avatar he is.”
The novel has become an emblem of free-spiritedness and a how-to of nonconformity since its publication in 1957 (so much so that it is probably banal to discuss as such). Chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, Kerouac’s novel has (for many people) secured a lasting position as one of the great works of American literature.
The novel itself is based closely upon actual people and events in the life of Jack Kerouac. It is a story of the road-bound adventures of Sal Paradise (Kerouac), Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), Carlo Marx (Ginsberg), Old Bull Lee (Burroughs), and a host of other eccentric characters. The tale is a primarily linear account of various roadtrips across and through the United States and Mexico.
Having first read the novel my sophomore year of college, I thought it would be an appropriate book to bring with me when I set out for South Korea (call me corny and unoriginal; fine). I finished re-reading it a couple weeks ago, and I appreciated it all the more the second time around. Regardless of certain controversy surrounding the Beats and the fact that many a pretentious contemporary might scoff at me for championing it, On the Road is one of my favorite novels and contains a worldview that I feel is important to consider.
The Primacy of Discovering Meaning Through Experience
As touched upon above, the Beat Movement was largely about attempting to discover meaning in the face of a world that seemed (to many) to be increasingly meaningless. The Beats reacted to a modern civilization that devalued the individual pursuit of meaning and instead gave precedence to productivity, “progress”, and the reinforcement of tradition.
In On the Road, the characters’ spontaneous and outrageous journeys over thousands of miles can be seen as the literal manifestation of this inward search for meaning. Their willingness to pick up and hit the road, regardless of the current situation, symbolizes their prioritization of self-exploration, their almost spiritual loyalty to novel experience. Traditional responsibilities and limitations are disregarded in favor of the promise of new sights, new people, new perspectives.
This attitude is evidenced in a particularly incoherent bit of rambling from Dean in the latter part of the novel:
 
“‘What’s your road, man?—holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?” We nodded in the rain. “Sheeit, and you’ve got to look out for your boy. He ain’t a man ‘less he’s a jumpin man—do what the doctor say. I’ll tell you, Sal, straight, no matter where I live, my trunk’s always sticking out from under the bed, I’m ready to leave or get thrown out.’”
Dean is always prepared to roam, always ready to see more of his road, his being. He and the other characters in the novel deliberately challenge the boundaries of freedom, attempt to leave no proverbial stone unturned. For them, limited possibilities (such as those given to them by society) equal limited understanding, while unfettered exploration is the key to liberation.
Intense Feeling, Uninhibited Expression, and Exuberant Appreciation

We have established that it was the felt experience of the unfettered individual which the Beats emphasized, but were there more specific qualities to aspire to? In what aspects of the individual being was meaning to be found and created?