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Beat Generation: Jack Kerouac
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Women of the Beat Generation (Conari Press/hardcover/366 pages) was one of the first books offered by American Legends--and remains one of the most popular. This very attractively designed anthology contains biographical essays, poems, and short memoirs by the wives, lovers, and literary companions of Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady, LeRoi Jones and other founders of the Beat movement. These women were often brilliant and talented writers in their own right--and editor Brenda Knight has tied this amazing collection together with fascinating biographical sketches of the contributors and their place in Beat history: The writers include:
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Years before the publication of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the media was showering the nation with stories of the Beat Generation. When Kerouac emerged, he became the quintessential "beatnik," a word created by journalist Herb Caen as a play on the satellite Sputnik; Caen and others insisted that the Beat types were "equally far out" (qtd. in Watson 4). The media found their spokesperson and whipping boy in Kerouac and friends. Portrayed as mythic figures, Kerouac and other beats became the focus of newspapers and film. They pinned these writers with the beatnik archetype of goateed, bereted, bongo playing, marijuana smoking poets.
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Allen Ginsberg was a tireless promoter of the works of other members of the Beat Generation. He considered himself a pro bono literary agent for all of his friends and for those with similar ideas. For example, he was instrumental in getting William S. Burroughs's first book, (Junkie), published. Ginsberg had encouraged Burroughs to write in the first place. He did extensive editing on Naked Lunch, with some help from Kerouac and others. Burroughs and Ginsberg ... collaborated on the book The Yage Letters.[20]
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The ethos of the beat generation had influence across all of the arts. It seemed as if, at the time, the young were breaking free of the old constraints. Marlon Brando and James Dean were ripping through film screens. Jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie were playing their music without barriers. Lenny Bruce was questioning racism and sexuality through his comedy routines. Artists such as Jackson Pollock were exploding onto the canvas and ripping apart the Old Masters.
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It was more than half a century ago, in 1957, that Jack Kerouac published On the Road, his picaresque novel of yearning and alienation in a strange new America that became the bible of the Beat Generation. One year earlier, his friend and fellow traveler, the poet Allen Ginsberg, had published Howl, a Beat epic poem which became the hymnal of that generation. In the years before and after, through the mid 1960s, the founding canon of the Beat/Hip school of literature was amplified by such other outlaw scribes as William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Denise Levertov and Richard Brautigan.
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When "On the Road" came out, in September, 1957, it was praised in the New York Times as the novel of the Beat Generation, equivalent in stature and significance to "The Sun Also Rises," the novel of the Lost Generation. The book was a best-seller, and it made Jack Kerouac, who had worked on it for ten years, a celebrity. It is sometimes said of Kerouac that fame killed him—that he was driven crazy by being continually addressed as the spokesman for a generation and by endless unwelcome requests to explain the meaning of the term "Beat." Kerouac was certainly undone by something. After the success of "On the Road," he continued to write at a manic pace, as he always had, but he became a suicidal alcoholic, and he died, of a hemorrhage caused by acute liver damage, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven. (He had by then written more than twenty-five books.) The notion of the Beat Generation was hardly thrust upon him, though.
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Jack Kerouac