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THE BEAT GENERATION

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-1950s 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.Perhaps equally important were the less obviously creative
members of the scene, who helped form their intellectual environment and provided the
writers with much of their subject material: There was Herbert Huncke, a drug addict and
petty thief met by Burroughs in 1946; and Hal Chase, an anthropologist from Denver who in
1947 introduced into the group Neal Cassady.Also important were the oft-neglected women in
the original circle, including Joan Vollmer and Edie Parker. Their apartment in the upper west
side of Manhattan often functioned as a salon (or as Ted Morgan puts it, a "pre-sixties
commune") and Joan Vollmer in particular was a serious participant in the marathon
discussion sessions.William Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1914; making him
roughly ten years older than most of the other original beats. While still living in St. Louis,
Burroughs met David Kammerer, presumbably an association based on their shared
homosexual orientation. David Kammerer was a homosexual intellectual. As a boys' youth-
group leader in the mid-1930s, he became infatuated with Lucien Carr, a rich teenager in the
group. They developed a friendship. Although Carr was not gay, he apparently enjoyed the
attention of the older man and let Kammerer follow him to the various schools he was
expelled from, Andower, then Bowdoin, and then (in the fall of 1942) the University of
Chicago. That's where Kammerer introduced 17-year-old Lucien Carr to his old St. Louis
friend William S. Burroughs.Burroughs was a Harvard-graduate who had been around the
world and pretty much lived off his family, his grandfather having invented the Burroughs
Adding Machine. After reading a book called You Can't Win, Burroughs was fascinated with
the criminal underworld and in Chicago assosiated with thieves and the like, plotting to stick
up a Turkish bath and rob an armored car. Nothing ever went past the planning stage.The
three became good friends and madcap companions. Their pranks and escapades got
Burroughs kicked out of his rooming house and culminated in an ambiguous suicide by Carr,
which got him sent home to St. Louis.Soon, however, he moved on to Columbia University,
where Kammerer followed, and shortly after (summer 1943), Burroughs as well. They
became two dignified, respected elders of the Columbia group of friends Carr developed. One
such friend was freshman Allen Ginsberg, whom Carr met in late 1943 and introduced to
Burroughs and Kammerer. Edie Parker, another member of the crowd, introduced Carr to her
boyfriend Jack Kerouac once he came back from his stint as a merchant marine. They became
extremely close friends fast. In 1944 Carr introduced Kerouac and Burroughs, who also
became good friends, though he was not quite a part of the Columbia student scene.The center
of the attention was on the strange relationship between Kemmerer and Carr. Kammerer's
fixation was becoming out of control, and in mid-August, 1944, Lucien Carr killed him with a
boyscout knife in self defense after Kammerer allegedly claimed he'd kill Carr if they didn't
make love immediately. The crime took place in a park on the Hudson River. Carr dragged
the body into the river. He first went to Burroughs for advice, who told him to contact the
police and his family immediately, and not to talk to anyone else. Instead, Carr went to
Kerouac and told him about the murder. The two of them threw the knife into a drain, went
drinking, and saw a movie. Carr turned himself in the next morning and Kerouac and
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Burroughs were both charged as accessories to the crime. Burrouyghs quickly got the money
for bail, but Kerouac's parents refused to post it for him. Edie Parker and her family came
through, with the condition that they be married immediately.

While Carr was in prison, Kerouac and Ginsberg began a close friendship, and soon the two
of them and Burroughs formed a trinity.Burroughs had long had an interest in experimenting
with criminal behavior, and gradually made contacts in the criminal underground of New
York, becoming involved with dealing in stolen goods and narcotics and developing a
decades long addiction to opiates. Burroughs met Herbert Huncke, a small-time criminal and
drug addict who often hung around the Times Square area.The beats found Huncke a
fascinating character. As Ginsberg put it, they were on a quest for "supreme reality", and
somehow felt that Huncke, as a member of the underclass had learned things they were
sheltered from in their middle/upper-middle class lives.Various problems resulted from this
association: In 1949 Ginsberg was in trouble with the law (his apartment was packed with
stolen goods, he had been riding in a car full of stolen goods, and so on). He pleaded insanity
and was briefly committed to Bellevue, where he met Carl Solomon. When committed Carl
Solomon was more eccentric than psychotic — a fan of Antonin Artaud, he indulged in some
self-consciously "crazy" behavior: he stole a peanut butter sandwich in a cafeteria, and
showed it to a security guard. If not crazy when he was admitted, he was arguably driven mad
by the insulin shock treatments applied at Bellevue, and this is one of the things referred to in
Ginsberg's poem "Howl" (which was dedicated to Carl Solomon). After his release, Solomon
became the publishing contact that agreed to publish Burroughs first novel "Junky" (1953)
shortly before another serious psychotic episode resulted in him being committed again.The
introduction of Neal Cassady into the scene in 1947 had a number of effects. A number of the
beats were enthralled with Cassady — Ginsberg had an affair with him; and Kerouac's road
trips with him in the late 40s became a focus of his second novel, On the Road. Cassady is
most likely the source of "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). This novel
(when it eventually appeared in 1957) transformed Cassady (under the name "Dean
Moriarty") into a cultural icon: a hyper wildman, frequently broke, largely amoral, but
frantically engaged with life.The time lags involved in the publication of Kerouac's On the
Road often creates confusion: It was written in 1952 — around the time that John Clellon
Holmes published "Go", and the article "This is the beat generation" — and it covered events
that took place much earlier, beginning in the late 40s. Since the book was not published until
1957, many people received the impression that it was describing the late '50s era, though it
was actually a document of a time ten years earlier. The legend of how "On the Road" was
written was as influential as the book itself: high on speed, Kerouac typed rapidly on a
continuous scroll of telegraph paper to avoid having to break his chain of thought at the end of
each sheet of paper. Kerouac's dictum was that "the first thought is best thought", and insisted
that you should never revise text after it is written — though there remains some question
about how carefully Kerouac observed this rule.In 1950 Gregory Corso met Ginsberg, who
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was impressed by the poetry Corso had written while incarcerated for burglary. Gregory
Corso was the young d'Artagnan added to the original three of the core beat writers, and for
decades the four were often spoken of together; though later critical attention for Corso (the
least proflific of the four) waned. Corso's first book The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other
Poems appeared in 1955.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.An account of the Six Gallery reading forms the second chapter of
Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, a novel about another poet that read at the
event: Gary Snyder (written about under the name of "Japhy Ryder"). Most of the people in
the Beat movement had urban backgrounds and they found Snyder to be an almost exotic
individual, with his backcountry and rural experience, and his education in cultural
anthropology and Oriental languages. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has referred to him as 'the
Thoreau of the Beat Generation". One of the primary subjects of The Dharma Bums is
Buddhism, and the different attitudes that Kerouac and Snyder have towards it. The Dharma
Bums undoubtably helped to popularize Buddhism in the West.

Women of 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. The poet and anarchist Elsa Gidlow,
who hitchiked from New York (where she had lived in Greenwich Village) to the San
Francisco area in 1940, is representative of independent-minded women in the 'bohemian
background' of the popularly recognized Beat Generation. Gidlow later became an integral
member of the West Coast circle that included philosopher Alan Watts.

Joan Vollmer (later, Joan Vollmer Burroughs) was clearly there at the beginning of the Beat
Generation, and all accounts describe her as a very intelligent and interesting woman. But she
did not herself write and publish, and unlike 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 (or perhaps "accidental") shooting. Gregory Corso insisted that there were many
female beats, in particular, he claimed that a young woman he met in mid-1955 (Hope
Savage, also called "Sura") introduced Kerouac and Ginsberg to subjects such as Li Po and
was in fact their original teacher regarding eastern religion (this claim must be an
exaggeration, however: a letter from Kerouac to Ginsberg in 1954 recommended a number of
works about Buddhism). Corso insisted that it was hard for women 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). This is confirmed by Diane di Prima (in a
1978 interview collected in The Beat Vision): I can't say a lot of really great women writers
were ignored in my time, but I can say a lot of potentially great women writers wound up
dead or crazy. I think of the women on the Beat scene with me in the early '50s, where are
they now? I know Barbara Moraff is a potter and does some writing in Vermont, and that's
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about all I know. I know some of them ODed and some of them got nuts, and one woman that
I was running around the Village with in '53 was killed by her parents putting her in a shock
treatment place in Pennsylvania ...However, a number of female beats have perservered,
notably Joyce Johnson (author of Minor Characters); Carolyn Cassady (author of Off the
Road); Hettie Jones (author of How I Became Hettie Jones); Joanne Kyger (author of As
Ever; Going On; Japan and India Journals; Just Space); and the aforementioned Diane di
Prima (author of This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, Memoirs of a Beatnik). Later, other
women writers emerged who were strongly influenced by the beats, such as Janine Pommy
Vega (published by City Lights) in the 1960s, and Patti Smith in the early 1970s.

The Beatnik stereotype

Beatnik

The term Beatnik was coined by Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 1958
as a derogatory term, and was probably a reference to the recent Russian satellite Sputnik.
Caen's coining of this term appeared to suggest that beatniks were (1) "far out of the
mainstream of society" and (2) "possibly pro-Communist". Caen's new 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. It should be noted that thousands
of young people on college campuses and even in high schools came to regard themselves as
beats or beatniks in the late 1950s and very early 1960s and many of them behaved in a
manner very similar to that of the popular stereotype; indeed they comprised a cultural
movement of sorts, apart from the literary beats, and often were proud to be called beatniks.

Influences on Western culture

There are many authors who can claim to be influenced by the beats (see the individual
articles for each of the Beat writers); but the Beat Generation phenomenon itself has had a
huge influence on Western Culture overall, larger than just the effects of some writers and
artists on other writers and artists.
In many ways, the Beats can be taken as the first subculture (here meaning a cultural
subdivision on intellectual/artistic/lifestyle/political grounds, rather than on any obvious
difference in ethnic or religious backgrounds). During the very conformist post-World War II
era they were one of the forces engaged in a questioning of traditional values which produced
a break with the mainstream culture that to this day people react to -- or against.

There's no question that Beats produced a great deal of interest in lifestyle

experimentation(notably in regards to sex and drugs); and they had a large intellectual effect
in encouraging the questioning of authority (a force behind the anti-war movement); and
many of them were very active in popularizing interest in Zen Buddhism in the West.

A quotation from Allen Ginsberg's A Definition of the Beat Generation as published in

Friction, 1 (Winter 1982), revised for Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965:Some
essential effects of Beat Generation artistic movement can be characterized in the following
terms:* Spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation," i.e., gay liberation, somewhat
catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism.* Liberation of the
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word from censorship.* Demystification and/or decriminalization of some laws against

marijuana and other drugs.* The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art
form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and other popular musicians influenced in the
later fifties and sixties by Beat generation poets' and writers' works.* The spread of ecological
consciousness, emphasized early on by Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, the notion of a
"Fresh Planet."* Opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in
writings of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac.* Attention to what Kerouac called
(after Spengler) a "second religiousness" developing within an advanced civilization.* Return
to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy as against state regimentation.* Respect for land and
indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road:
"The Earth is an Indian thing."The essence of the phrase "beat generation" may be found in
On the Road with the celebrated phrase: "Everything belongs to me because I am poor."

Transition to the "Hippie" era

Some time during the 1960s, the rapidly expanding "beat" culture underwent a
transformation: the "Beat Generation" gave way to "The Sixties Counterculture", which was
accompanied by a shift in public terminology from "Beatnik" to "hippie".This was in many
respects a gradual transition. Many of the original Beats remained active participants, notably
Allen Ginsberg, who became a fixture of the anti-war movement -- though equally notably,
Kerouac did not remain active on the scene: he broke with Ginsberg and criticized the 60s
protest movements as "new excuses for spitefulness".The Beats in general were a large
influence on members of the new "counterculture", for example, in the case of Bob Dylan
who became a close friend of Allen Ginsberg.The year 1963 found Ginsberg living in San
Francisco with Neal Cassady and Charles Plymell at 1403 Gough St. Shortly after that
Ginsberg connected with Ken Kesey's crowd who was doing LSD testing at Stanford, and
Plymell was instrumental in publishing the first issue of R. Crumb's Zap Comix on his
printing press a few years later then moved to Ginsberg's commune in Cherry Valley, NY in
the early 1970s. (The Plymells never lived at the Farm, just visited there; although they
remained in Cherry Valley.)According to Ed Sanders the change in the public label from
"beatnik" to "hippie" happened after the 1967 "Be-In" in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park
(where Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure were leading the crowd in
chanting "Om").There were certainly some stylistic differences between "beatniks" and
"hippies" — somber colors, dark shades, and goatees gave way to colorful "psychedelic"
clothing and long hair. The beats were known for "playing it cool" (keeping a low profile) but
the hippies became known for "being cool" (displaying their individuality).In addition to the
stylistic changes, there were some changes in substance: the beats tended to be essentially
apolitical, but the hippies became actively engaged with the civil rights movement and the
anti-war movement. To quote Gary Snyder in a 1974 interview (collected in The Beat
Vision):... the next key point was Castro taking over Cuba. The apolitical quality of Beat
thought changed with that. It sparked quite a discussion and quite a dialogue; many people
had been basic pacifists with considerable disillusion with Marxian revolutionary rhetoric. At
the time of Castro's victory, it had to be rethought again. Here was a revolution that had used
violence and that was apparently a good thing. Many people abandoned the pacifist position at
that time or at least began to give more thought to it. In any case, many people began to look
to politics again as having possibilities. From that follows, at least on some levels, the
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beginning of civil rights activism, which leads through our one whole chain of events: the
Movement.We had little confidence in our power to make any long range or significant
changes. That was the 50s, you see. It seemed that bleak. So that our choices seemed entirely
personal existential lifetime choices that there was no guarantee that we would have any
audience, or anybody would listen to us; but it was a moral decision, a moral poetic decision.
Then Castro changed things, then Martin Luther King changed things ...

Drug usage
The original members or the Beat Generation group — in Allen Ginsberg's phrase, "the
libertine circle" — used a number of different drugs.In addition to the alcohol common in
American life, they were also interested in marijuana, benzedrine and, in some cases, opiates
such as morphine. As time went on, many of them began using other psychedelic drugs, such
as peyote, yage, and LSD.Much of this usage can fairly be termed "experimental", in that they
were generally unfamiliar with the effects of these drugs, and there were intellectual aspects
to their interest in them as well as a simple pursuit of hedonistic intoxication.Benzedrine at
that time was available in the form of plastic inhalers, containing a piece of folded paper
soaked in the drug. They would typically crack open the inhalers and drop the paper in coffee,
or just wad it up and swallow it whole.Opiates could be obtained in the form of morphine
"syrettes": a squeeze tube with a hypodermic needle tip.As the Beat phenomenon spread
(transforming from Beat to "beatnik" to "hippie"), usage of some of these drugs also became
more widespread. According to stereotype, the "hippies" commonly used the psychedelic
drugs (marijuana, LSD), though the use of other drugs such as amphetemines was also
widespread.The actual results of this "experimentation" can be difficult to determine. Claims
that some of these drugs can enhance creativity, insight or productivity were quite common,
as is the belief that the drugs in use were a key influence on the social events of the time.

Historical context

The postwar era was a time where the dominant culture was desperate for a reassuring
planned order; but there was a strong intellectual undercurrent calling for spontaneity, an end
to psychological repression; a romantic desire for a more chaotic, Dionysian existence.The
beats were a manifestation of this undercurrent (and over time, a primary focus for those
energies), but they were not the only one. Before Jack Kerouac embraced "spontaneous
prose", there were other artists pursuing self-expression by abandoning control, notably the
improvisational elements in jazz music, and the action paintings of Jackson Pollock and the
other abstract expressionists. Also, there were other artists in the post-war period who
embraced a similar disdain for refined control, often with the opposite intent of suppressing
the ego, and avoiding self-expression; notably, the works of the composer/writer John Cage
and the paintings and "assemblages" of Robert Rauschenberg. The "cut-up" technique that
Brion Gysin developed and that William Burroughs adopted after publishing Naked Lunch
bears a strong resemblance to Cage's "chance operations" approach.The beatniks were
certainly not the only form of experimental writing in the post-war period. Various other
movements/scenes can be identified that were happening roughly concurrently:

* The Angries a group of post-war British writers with which the Beats are sometimes
compared* The Black Mountain poets (which John Cage was also associated with)* The San
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Francisco Renaissance can be regarded as a separate movement of its own, with origins
preceding the beats.There were many influences on the beat generation writers: Blake was a
large intellectual influence on Allen Ginsberg and there are striking echoes of Walt
Whitman's style in Ginsberg's work; the novel You Can't Win by Jack Black was a strong
influence on William Burroughs; Marcel Proust's work was read by many of the beats, and
may have inspired Kerouac in his grand scheme for a multi-volume autobiographical work.
The full historical background arguably includes Henry David Thoreau, Imagism (especially
Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and H.D.), the Objectivists and Henry Miller. Some
points to consider:* Gary Snyder read Pound early and was encouraged in his interests in
Japan and China by Pound's work.* William Carlos Williams encouraged a number of beats
and wrote a preface for Howl and other poems.* Pound was also important to Allen Ginsberg
and to most of the San Francisco Rennaissance group (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, etc).

* H.D. was crucial to Robert Duncan.

* Rexroth published with the Objectivists.

This social trend in mid-twentieth-

century American lifewas constituted
by groups of alienated youths and younger adults, recognizable by their counterculture
enthusiasms and defiance of then
accepted norms of dress, deportment, and
relation to the work ethic. Beat is the older
term and it came into use to designate a
self-marginalized social group of the late
1950s and early 60s that was influenced by
existentialism and especially by the writers
of the Beat Generation. The journalistic
word "beatnik" is a pseudo-Slavic coinage
of a type popular in the 1960s, the core
element derivingfrom "beat" (generation),
the suffix -nik being the formative of the
noun of agent in Slavic languages. The
term "hippie" was originally a slightly
pejorative diminutive of the beat "hipster,"
which in turn seems to derive from
1940s jivetalk adjective "hep," meaning
"with it, in step with current fashions."
The original hippies were a younger group
with more spending money and more flamboyant
dress. Their music was rock instead
of the jazz of the beats. Despite
differences that seemed important at the
time, beats and hippies are probably best
regarded as successive phases of a single
phenomenon.
Although the media, which incessantly
sensationalized the beats and
hippies, did a great deal to foster recruitment,
the phenomenon has older roots,
stemming not only from its immediate
prefiguration in the small circle of beat
writers and their friends, but also from the
established Bohemian lifestyle of Western
Europe and North America. Bohemianism
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is typically the product of the confluence

of outcast groups in inner cities. Yet beats
and hippies, as part of the whole Counterculture
trend, had also a rural contingent,
manifested in the establishment of farms
run communally. Here a striking forerunner
is the English utopian socialist Edward
Carpenter (1 844-1 9291, a bearded, sandalwearing
man who lived with his male
lover and other associates working a market
garden and practicing various arts and
crafts. Significantly,