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Beat Generation: Jack Kerouac
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Concisely told and full of fascinating detail, "The Birth of the Beat Generation" chronicles the complex relationships among maverick writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac and the figures who surrounded them. With a new Afterword by Robert Creeley, this second volume in the widely praised series is devoted to the founders and founding ideas of Modernism.
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The Beat Generation advocated the rediscovery of the self, through a variety of ways. Casual sex, drugs, Zen Buddhism, and listening to music were obviously the most popular, and they were fitting trappings for those involved in the 'rucksack revolution' (the term care of Kerouac). Beats ... tried to experience as much as possible, so a favourite pastime was traipsing through America and getting to know people and see new things.
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The beginning of the Beat Generation is often traced back to Columbia University to the meeting of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Hal Chase, and others in the original circle. Although they were later considered anti-academic artists, the seed for the Beat Generation was planted in a highly academic environment. Many of their early ideas were formed during arguments with professors such as Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. This was the same environment in which some of their classmates, such as Louis Simpson and Donald Hall, became champions of formalism. This is where Carr and Ginsberg discussed the need for a "New Vision" (a term borrowed from Arthur Rimbaud) to move away from Columbia University's conservative notions of literature.
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The Beat writers were the avant-garde creators of the ideals that became severely muddled by their generation. The three talked of a "New Vision," an overhaul of modern ideals (Foster 5). Rather than live comforting lives and conforming to society's norms, the Beats sought to capture the spirit of America by living with junkies, thieves, and outcasts (Foster 5). These people lived insecure, fast lives, and Kerouac and Burroughs modeled not only their characters, but ... their form after them. They felt that the individual had no place in America in the fifties, and their sympathy for humanity is reflected in their works. The beats, especially Kerouac, felt that America no longer valued "wild self-believing individuality" (Foster 7).
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The canonical beat generation authors met in New York: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, (in the 1940s) and later (in 1950) Gregory Corso. In the mid-'50s this group expanded to include figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch and Kirby Doyle.
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Since 1958, the terms Beat Generation and beat have been used to describe the anti-materialistic literary movement that began with Kerouac in 1948, stretching on into the 1960s. Music historians saw that the beat philosophy of anti-materialism, combined with its fundamental soul-searching ethos, influenced 1960s musicians, such as Bob Dylan, the early Pink Floyd and The Beatles.
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Jack Kerouac