The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post–World War II and Cold War eras.Evans, Mike, The Beats: from Kerouac to Kesey : an illustrated journey through the Beat Generation, Running Press, Introduction The bulk of their work was published and popularized by members of the Silent Generation in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.The Beat Generation – Literature Periods & Movements.
Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959), and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best-known examples of Beat literature.Charters (1992) The Portable Beat Reader. Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States.Ann Charters, introduction, to Beat Down to Your Soul, Penguin Books (2001) p. xix "[...] the conclusion of the obscenity trial in San Francisco against Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems [...] in which Judge Clayton W. Horn concluded for the defendant that 'Howl' had what he called 'redeeming social content.'", p. xxxiii "After the successful Howl trial, outspoken and subversive literary magazines sprung up like wild mushrooms throughout the United States."Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw, New York: Avon, 1988. p. 347, trade paper edition : "The ruling on Naked Lunch in effect marked the end of literary censorship in the United States." The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.
The core group of Beat Generation authors—Herbert Huncke, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Kerouac—met in 1944 in and around Columbia University's campus in New York City. Later, in the mid-1950s, the central figures, except Burroughs and Carr, ended up together in San Francisco, where they met and became friends of figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance.
In the 1950s, a Beatnik subculture formed around the literary movement, although this was often viewed critically by major authors of the Beat movement. In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the hippie and larger counterculture movements. Neal Cassady, as the driver for Ken Kesey's bus Furthur, was the primary bridge between these two generations. Ginsberg's work also became an integral element of 1960s hippie culture, in which he actively participated. The hippie culture was practiced primarily by older members of the following generation, the baby boomers.
Etymology Although Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948 to characterize a perceived underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York, fellow poet Herbert Huncke is credited with first using the word "beat". The name arose in a conversation with writer John Clellon Holmes. Kerouac allows that it was Huncke, a street hustler, who originally used the phrase "beat", in an earlier discussion with him. The adjective "beat" could colloquially mean "tired" or "beaten down" within the African-American community of the period and had developed out of the image "beat to his socks","Beat to his socks, which was once the black's most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation..." James Baldwin, "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What is it?," The New York Times, July 29, 1979."The word 'beat' was primarily in use after World War II by jazz musicians and hustlers as a slang term meaning down and out, or poor and exhausted. The jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow combined it with other words, like 'dead beat' ..." Ann Charters, The Portable Beat reader, 1992, , ."Hebert Huncke picked up the word [beat] from his show business friends on the Near North Side of Chicago, and in the fall of 1945 he introduced the word to William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac." Steven Watson, "The Birth of the Beat Generation" (1995), p. 3, . but Kerouac expanded on the meaning to include the connotations "upbeat", "beatific", and the musical association of being "on the beat", and "the Beat to keep" from the Beat Generation poem.The exuberance is much stronger in the published On the Road, than in its manuscript (in scroll-form). Lucy Sante: "In the scroll the use of the word "holy" must be 80 percent less than in the novel, and psalmodic references to the author's unique generation are down by at least two-thirds; uses of the word "beat", for that matter, clearly favor the exhausted over the beatific." New York Times Book Review, August 19, 2007.
Significant places Columbia University The origins of the Beat Generation can be traced to Columbia University and the meeting of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carr, Hal Chase and others. Kerouac attended Columbia on a football scholarship.Beard, Rick, and Leslie Berlowitz. 1993. Greenwich Village: Culture and Counterculture. New Brunswick, N.J. Published for the Museum of the City of New York by Rutgers University Press. 167. Though the beats are usually regarded as anti-academic,"In this essay "Beat" includes those American poets considered avant-garde or anti-academic from c. 1955 – 1965.", Lee Hudson, "Poetics in Performance: The Beat Generation" collected in Studies in interpretation, Volume 2, ed Esther M. Doyle, Virginia Hastings Floyd, 1977, Rodopi, , 9789062030705, p. 59."... resistance is bound to occur in bringing into the academy such anti-academic writers as the Beats.", Nancy McCampbell Grace, Ronna Johnson, Breaking the rule of cool: interviewing and reading women beat writers, 2004, Univ. Press of Mississippi, , , p. x."The Black Mountain school originated at the sometime Black Mountain College of Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1950s and gave rise to an anti-academic academy that was the center of attraction for many of the disaffiliated writers of the period, including many who were known in other contexts as the Beats or the Beat generation and the San Francisco school." Steven R. Serafin, Alfred Bendixen, The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature, 2005, Continuum International Publishing Group, , , p. 901. many of their ideas were formed in response to professors like Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. Classmates Carr and Ginsberg discussed the need for a "New Vision" (a term borrowed from W. B. Yeats), to counteract what they perceived as their teachers' conservative, formalistic literary ideals.
Times Square "underworld" Ginsberg was arrested in 1949. The police attempted to stop Jack Melody (a.k.a. "little Jack") while he was driving a car in Queens with Priscella Arminger (alias, Vickie Russell or "Detroit Redhead") and Allen Ginsberg in the back seat. The car was filled with stolen items Little Jack planned to fence. Jack Melody crashed while trying to flee, rolled the car and the three of them escaped on foot. Allen Ginsberg lost his glasses in the accident and left incriminating notebooks behind. He 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.Morgan, Literary Outlaw (1988), pp. 163–165.
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 Dadaism. 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, Junkie, in 1953.Morgan, Literary Outlaw (1988), pp 205–6.
Greenwich Village Beat writers and artists flocked to Greenwich Village in New York City in the late 1950s because of low rent and the "small town" element of the scene. Folksongs, readings and discussions often took place in Washington Square Park.McDarrah, Fred W., and Gloria S. McDarrah. 1996. Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village. New York: Schirmer Books. Allen Ginsberg was a big part of the scene in the Village, as was Burroughs, who lived at 69 Bedford Street.Beard and Berlowitz. 1993. Greenwich Village. "The Beat Generation in the Village." 165–198.
Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and other poets frequented many bars in the area, including the San Remo Cafe at 93 MacDougal Street on the northwest corner of Bleecker, Chumley's, and Minetta Tavern. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and other abstract expressionists were also frequent visitors of and collaborators with the Beats.Beard and Berlowitz. 1993. Greenwich Village. "The Beat Generation in the Village." 170. Cultural critics have written about the transition of Beat culture in the Village into the Bohemian hippie culture of the 1960s.Beard and Berlowitz. 1993. Greenwich Village. "The Beat Generation in the Village." 178.
In 1960, a presidential election year, the Beats formed a political party, the "Beat Party," and held a mock nominating convention to announce a presidential candidate: the African-American street poet Big Brown, won a majority of votes on the first ballot but fell short of the eventual nomination. The Associated Press reported, "Big Brown's lead startled the convention. Big, as the husky African American is called by his friends, wasn't the favorite son of any delegation, but he had one tactic that earned him votes. In a chatterbox convention, only once did he speak at length, and that was to read his poetry."
San Francisco and the Six Gallery reading
Ginsberg had visited Neal and Carolyn Cassady in San Jose, California in 1954 and moved to San Francisco in August. He fell in love with Peter Orlovsky at the end of 1954 and began writing Howl. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of the new City Lights Bookstore, started to publish the City Lights Pocket Poets Series in 1955.
Kenneth Rexroth's apartment became a Friday night literary salon (Ginsberg's mentor William Carlos Williams, an old friend of Rexroth, had given him an introductory letter). When asked by Wally HedrickJonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation: "Wally Hedrick, a painter and veteran of the Korean War, approached Ginsberg in the summer of 1955 and asked him to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery... At first, Ginsberg refused. But once he'd written a rough draft of Howl, he changed his 'fucking mind,' as he put it." 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, 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.Ginsberg, Allen. Howl. 1986 critical edition edited by Barry Miles, Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts & Bibliography (pbk.)McClure, Michael. Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac. Penguin, 1994. .