The term beat generation was introduced by Jack Kerouac in
approximately 1948 to
describe his social circle to the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who published the first novel of the beat
generation, titled Go, in 1952, along with a manifesto of sorts in the New York Times Magazine: "This is the beat generation"). The adjective
"beat" (introduced by Herbert Huncke) had the connotations of "tired" or "down and out",
but Kerouac added the paradoxical connotations of "upbeat" and
"beatific".
Calling this relatively small group of struggling writers, artists,
hustlers and drug addicts a "generation" was to make the claim that
they were representative and important—the beginnings of a new trend, analogous
to the influential Lost Generation. This is the kind of bold move that could be seen as delusions of
grandeur, aggressive salesmanship or perhaps a display of perceptive insight. History shows
it was clearly not just a delusion, but possibly a real insight into some real
trends that became self-reinforcing: the label helped to create what it
described.
The members of the beat generation were new bohemian
libertines, who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity. The beat
writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of
non-conformity and for its non-conforming style. They were both directly and
indirectly influenced by the European trend in Existentialist philosophy.
The canonical beat generation authors met in New York: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, (in the 1940s) and
later (in 1950) Gregory Corso. Columbia University, where Ginsberg and Kerouac had met as undergraduates, was its original
locale. In the mid-50s this
group expanded to include San Francisco area figures such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch.
Some major works from these writers are Kerouac's On the Road, Ginsberg's Howl, and Burroughs' Naked Lunch.
Perhaps equally important were the less obviously creative members of
the scene: Lucien Carr (who introduced Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs); Herbert Huncke, a drug addict and petty thief met by Burroughs in 1946; Hal Chase, an anthropologist from Denver who in 1947
introduced into the group Neal Cassady. Cassady was immortalized by Kerouac in the novel On the Road
(under the name "Dean Moriarty") as a hyper wildman, frequently
broke, largely amoral, but frantically engaged with life.
Cassady was known for "rapping" the loose spontaneous babble
that later became associated with "beatniks". He was not much of a
writer himself, though the core writers of the group were impressed with the
free-flowing style of some of his letters, and Kerouac cited this as a key
influence on his invention of the spontaneous prose style/technique that he
used in On the Road (the other obvious influence being the improvised
solos of Jazz music).
All of this does not yet mention the oft-neglected women in the original
circle, such as Joan Vollmer and
Edie Parker. Their apartment in the upper west side of Manhattan often
functioned as a salon and/or crash-pad, and Joan Vollmer in particular was a
serious participant in the marathon discussion sessions. See the section
"Women of the Beat Generation" below.
In 1950 Gregory Corso met Ginsberg, who was impressed by the poetry Corso had written while
incarcerated for burglary. Then during the 1950s there was much
cross-pollination with San Francisco area writers (Ginsberg, Corso, Cassady and Kerouac all moved there for
a time). Ferlinghetti (one of the partners who ran the City Lights press and
bookstore) became a focus of the scene as well as the older poet Rexroth, whose
apartment became a Friday night literary salon. Rexroth organized the famous
Six Gallery reading in 1955, the first public appearance of Ginsberg's poem Howl. A short
fictional account of this event forms the second chapter of Jack Kerouac's 1959 novel
The Dharma Bums.
When On the Road was finally published in 1957 (it
had been written in 1951), it
received a strong review in the New York Times Book Review and became a
best-seller. This produced a wave of fame that all of the beats from then on
had to surf on or drown under.
William Burroughs' Naked Lunch was the first of a series of novels
in which he completely revolutionized science fiction by introducing elements more usually found in modernist writing. The impact of his achievement has influenced trends in science
fiction ever since and can be seen particularly clearly in the writings of Michael Moorcock, Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard.
The term "Beatnik" was coined by Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 1958 as a
derogatory term, a reference to the Russian satellite Sputnik,
which managed to suggest that the beats were (1) "way out there" and
(2) pro-Communist. This
term stuck and became the popular label associated with a new stereotype of
men with goatees and berets
playing bongos while
women wearing black leotards dance.
A classic example of the beatnik image is the character Maynard G. Krebs
played by Bob Denver on
the Dobie Gillis television show
that ran from 1959 to 1963.
In the popular television cartoon show, The Simpsons, the parents of Ned Flanders are beatniks. (See episode 4F07 - "Hurricane Neddy")
A sensationalist Hollywood interpretation of the sub-culture can be seen in the 1959 movie The Beat Generation.
There is typically very little mention of women in a history of the
early Beat Generation, and a strong argument can be made that this omission is
largely a reflection of the sexism of the time rather than a reflection of the actual state of affairs. Joan Vollmer
(later, Joan Vollmer Burroughs) was clearly there at the beginning, and all
accounts describe her as a very intelligent and interesting woman. But she did
not herself write and publish, and unlike someone like Neal Cassady, no one
chose to write a book about her; she has gone down in history as the wife of
William Burroughs, killed in an accidental shooting.
Gregory Corso insisted that there were many female beats, but that it was hard for
them to get away with a Bohemian existence in that era: they were regarded as
crazy, and removed from the scene by force (e.g. by being subjected to electroshock). In particular, he mentioned a young woman named "Hope", who
he asserted was the original teacher of Kerouac and Ginsberg regarding eastern
religion, introducing them to subjects such as Li Po.
Still, many of those who entered the scene slightly later in the
mid-1950s have persevered, for example: Joyce Johnson (author of Minor
Characters); Hettie Jones (author of How I Became Hettie Jones); and
Diane Di Prima (author of This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, Memoirs of a
Beatnik). Later, Janine Pommy Vega was one of the women whose work was published by City Lights in the 1960s.
"The
so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different
nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked."
"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 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."
Founded in 1994 by Levi Asher, Literary Kicks is a website that functions as a digital library of poetry and prose, biography and cultural criticism. The theme is
the Beat Generation, from Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs and all their friends and
associates through to current writings of extant Beat genre and milieu.
Since 1996 Literary Kicks has hosted poetry
readings in
In 1998, LitKicks Publishing, was created. The first LitKicks publication was
a digital video, named Notes From
Underground, a reference to the Fyodor Dostoevsky story of the same name. LitKicks
website hosts literary discussions, boards and lists, and a digital library of
articles includes themes of:
LitKicks current staff includes
Levi Asher, Caryn Thurman and Jamelah Faith Earle.
Though a Bohemian is a native of the Czech
The term has become associated
with various artistic or academic communities and is used as a
generalized adjective describing such people, environs,
or situations: "bohemian" is defined in The American College
Dictionary as "a person with artistic or intellectual tendencies, who
lives and acts with no regard for conventional rules of behavior."
Conventional Americans often
associate 'bohemians' with drugs and self-induced poverty, but,
overall, many of the most talented European and American literary figures of the
last century and a half have had a bohemian cast, so that a list of
bohemians would be tediously long. Even a bourgeois writer like
Honoré de Balzac approved of
"The term
'Bohemian' has come to be very commonly accepted in our day as the description
of a certain kind of literary gipsey, no matter in what language he speaks, or
what city he inhabits .... A Bohemian is simply an artist or littérateur
who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in
art." (Westminster Review, 1862, noted at http://www.etymonline.com/b5etym.htm)