Beat Generation

The Beat Generation was a group of poets, authors, and artists who challenged and actively rebelled against the homogenization of American culture in the 1950s. Led by writers William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack KEROUAC, the group’s defiant need to reject the predominant status quo, personified by uninhibited drug experimentation, helped sow the seeds of a COUNTERCULTURE that came into its own during the mid to late 1960s.

In 1944, Ginsberg, a student at Columbia University, and Kerouac, a former Columbia student, met Burroughs through their mutual friend Lucien Carr. Although they were a study in differences—Ginsberg was Jewish, a rather awkward and unassuming intellectual, Kerouac was a Catholic French-Canadian, attending Columbia on a football scholarship, and Burroughs was a polished upper-class Anglo-Saxon Protestant whose connections in New York’s underworld helped support a rabid drug habit—they soon became fast friends and moved into a communal apartment in the city.

The three became part of a larger Bohemian community later christened by Kerouac as the Beats. It included John Clellon Holmes, whose 1952 work Go was the first true Beat novel, Gary Snyder, a naturalist thought of as his era’s Henry David Thoreau, and Gregory Corso, the Beat poet considered second only to Ginsberg. Enjoying the sexual and cultural freedom of New York’s Greenwich Village—both Burroughs and Ginsberg were openly gay—the group held a passion for living life raw and free, happily rejecting the affluence and passive accommodation of the Truman and Eisenhower eras. More important, these men were writers who desperately wanted to capture their emotions and experiences using the most nakedly honest words possible.

Kerouac, the man who many felt personified the Beats, was driven by a need to record the unpolished pace of a truly free life filled with action and adventure. Unsuccessful with the 1950 publication of his traditional novel The Town and the City, Kerouac shifted gears in 1951, writing On the Road in three weeks on one long roll of typing paper. At first Kerouac’s masterpiece, based on travels in the West he took with friend Neal Cassady, amounted to a single extended paragraph with little punctuation; it remained unpublished until 1957. Ginsberg’s 1955 freeform poem, Howl, which continued Kerouac’s stream-of-consciousness style, was the first Beat success story. The considerable clout Ginsberg gained from Howl allowed him to promote the works of his friends.

Just as Howl and On the Road broke new ground in both form and content, Burroughs’s novel, Naked Lunch, published in 1962, was one of the most innovative works of Beat literature. Devoid of a single protagonist and stubbornly nonlinear in its style and plot, the book took most of its material from Burroughs’s travels through South America and North Africa on a quest mainly for men and more potent drugs. Critics took Burroughs, like they did Ginsberg for Howl, to court on charges of obscenity.

By the late 1950s, the Beats were too well known and well read to be restrained by lawsuits or even bad reviews. As these men moved about the country, the movement spread to San Francisco as well as Kansas City and Chicago, and it reached college campuses nationwide. On the Road, Howl, and other Beat works quickly became a clarion call to a vast subculture of devoted followers. Their adoption of the slang of urban blacks (including words like “dig,” “hip,” “square,” “swing,” “cool,” and “man”) led novelist Norman Mailer in 1957 to reflect on the social connection in his essay, “The White Negro.” Notorious for crowding into nightclubs to read poetry in the style of their heroes, the group also received the title of “Beatniks” and were precursors of the hippies of the 1960s.

As the counterculture emerged, Ginsberg took his newfound celebrity in stride, quickly becoming the Beats’ most prominent spokesman, befriending such 1960s icons as Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, and Bob Dylan. Kerouac, at heart a rather conservative man, was discouraged by the attention his writing received as a blueprint for rebellion. He withdrew from his friends and turned instead to alcohol, living in seclusion in Florida. In the 1960s, he published a few books on Buddhism, particularly The Dharma Bums, which helped to popularize the religion during the period. By 1969, however, embittered that his life never truly lived up to his myth, he died of internal hemorrhaging brought on by his alcoholism. With Kerouac gone and Cassady dead a year earlier, the Beats, overtaken by a more mainstream counterculture they helped to create, faded into relative obscurity.

Both Ginsberg and Burroughs enjoyed long careers that lasted well into the 1990s, reuniting in 1982 with almost all of their Beat colleagues to celebrate the 25th anniversary of On the Road. Ginsberg died at 70 of liver cancer in April 1997, and Burroughs died, at 83, of natural causes in August of the same year.

Further reading: Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation (New York: Quill, 1971, 1994); Edward Halsey Foster, Understanding the Beats (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992); John Tytell, Paradise Outlaws: Remembering the Beats (New York: William Morrow, 1999).

—Adam B. Vary