American Poets Magazine. A Brief Guide to the Beat Poets. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.
Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter. Teach This Poem. Follow Us. Find Poets. Poetry Near You. A fan of the improvisational bop jazz of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis , Kerouac saw Cassady's huge monologues as verbal bop, and began developing a writing method based on this that he later outlined in The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose , including the notion of first-thought best-thought , which would greatly influence Ginsberg. Much of this nucleus was dispersing by the late s.
Kerouac, who had been in and out of the merchant marine during the war, spent to traveling the country with and without Cassady. He spent time in Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, Mexico City, and other places, and occasionally stopped at his mother's house to work on what would become his first book, the autobiographical, Thomas Wolfe—inspired novel, The Town and the City , which was published in These trips were eventually immortalized in his greatest work, On the Road.
Ginsberg, after having a hallucinated vision of William Blake and having gone through several failed romantic advances with Cassady, was arrested in for possession of Hunke's stolen property, stored at Ginsberg's apartment.
While there, he met Carl Solomon , a fellow intellectual and publisher, who connected to Ginsberg profoundly at a pivotal moment in the young poet's life, and was ultimately the muse to whom Ginsberg dedicated his masterwork, Howl. Meanwhile, Burroughs and Vollmer married and settled in Mexico City to cultivate their respective drug habits.
One night in , while waiting in an apartment to sell a gun, someone suggested that Burroughs an excellent marksman demonstrate his William Tell act. Vollmer put a glass on her head, but Burroughs shot low. She was struck in the forehead and died quickly. Burroughs ultimately faced very few legal consequences but was haunted by the act for the rest of his life. Two years later, Junky was published under the pseudonym William Lee.
Influenced by the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler , it is essentially a true confession of Burroughs's heroin addiction. Ace Paperbacks owned by Solomon's uncle published it as part of a two-volume set—the other volume being an antidrug tract by a former narcotics officer.
Kerouac, experiencing the most prolific writing time of his career, eventually moved to San Jose, California, with Cassady and his wife, Carolyn a three-way affair later documented in Carolyn's memoir Off the Road. Among the numerous projects he had completed by this time was On the Road , which was written in a twenty-day Benzedrine-induced frenzy on a single spool of typing paper.
The book would remain unpublished for several years, rejected even by Ace. In , Ginsberg traveled to San Jose to join them. Spurned by Cassady, and not wanted around by Carolyn, he quickly found himself in the bustling cultural scene just to the north, in San Francisco. During these same years, another scene was emerging in the San Francisco area.
Often considered an entirely different if overlapping movement by critics, as well as by some of the writers within each scene, the San Francisco Renaissance ultimately found its roots in the crossing of many spiritual, political, and literary influences.
Through the s, small literary magazines like Circle and Ark had been publishing experimental and radical poetry and prose, producing manifesto-like mission statements and attracting the disillusioned youth of the West Coast. Bringing a surrealist sensibility with him, Duncan soon met twenty-one-year-old Jack Spicer , a fan of Federico Garcia Lorca, who believed in the inherent magic of poetry and relentlessly pushed spoken word readings around town.
The two also became regulars at the lively anarchist literary meetings of Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth was an established poet, slightly older forty-five years old in , a founder of the radical radio station KPFA, and a tireless anarchist who contributed greatly to the sense of San Francisco as a legitimate cultural center.
Snyder, a serious outdoorsman and Zen Buddhist with an interest in Native American mythology, had studied linguistics and Asian culture—interests Rexroth shared. Whalen, too, studied Buddhism—he later was ordained a Buddhist monk—and occasionally worked as a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains. Welch was a scholar of Gertrude Stein; he had greatly impressed William Carlos Williams with his dissertation on her.
Welch suffered occasional nervous breakdowns and committed suicide in , but wrote with and influenced many of the San Francisco writers in this period. It was into this scene that Allen Ginsberg stepped in , bearing a letter of introduction to Rexroth from Williams, a fellow native of Paterson, New Jersey, to whom Ginsberg often wrote for literary mentoring. Some of Ginsberg's early letters were later published in Williams's postmodern masterpiece Paterson.
Intrigued by the scene and moved by many of the personalities within it, particularly Snyder, Ginsberg was soon joined by Kerouac. Not long after Kerouac's arrival, Ginsberg met Peter Orlovsky , a model for the painter Robert La Vigne , who would become Ginsberg's lover and life partner.
Poetry readings were popular in San Francisco around this time, thanks to people like Spicer and Bob Kaufman , a jazz poet who had known Kerouac briefly while they were both in the merchant marine. Along with presenting readings and selling radical magazines, City Lights bookstore, in North Beach, raised the literary consciousness of the city. Founded, and still owned by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti , a Sorbonne-educated veteran of World War II who saw Nagasaki just weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped on it, City Lights was modeled after the great paperback bookshops of Paris, and catered to a decidedly pacifist revolutionary sensibility.
Ferlinghetti also ran a small publishing house, City Lights Press, whose Pocket Poets series was intended to make poetry more accessible to the general public.
As literature became a more prominent part of the public consciousness in San Francisco, Rexroth decided to help showcase some of his younger poet friends.
He asked Ginsberg to organize a reading, which Rexroth would host, at a converted garage on Fillmore Street, called the Six Gallery. Lamantia, a surrealist who had known Ginsberg in New York, read poems by his late friend John Hoffman. McClure, the youngest reader at only twenty-three, had never met Snyder or Whalen until the reading. A Kansas native with a keen interest in animism and natural science, he had entered the poetry scene after taking a workshop with Duncan.
Kerouac had been asked to read, but declined, and instead took a collection for wine and sat on the edge of the low stage in the packed gallery. Ginsberg, the penultimate speaker, had been working frantically for two months on a visionary poem unlike any others he had written.
When do I get the manuscript? The reading made them all instant local celebrities, particularly Ginsberg, who quickly set to work finishing the poem and gathering a collection for Ferlinghetti's Pocket Poets series—in which Howl and Other Poems would be number four.
After this, things began to happen very quickly. A degree of notoriety had come to the San Francisco Renaissance, and the movement thrived for a short time, then dispersed. Gary Snyder was first to go, leaving for Japan, where he would spend most of the next ten years in a Zen monastery.
Before leaving, he took Kerouac on a climb up Matterhorn Mountain in Yosemite, an adventure that resulted in a spiritual breakthrough for Kerouac, which he would document in The Dharma Bums , along with the reading itself.
There was a going-away party for Snyder in , followed later in the year by the publication of Howl and Other Poems , which was seized by customs officials as obscene. Ferlinghetti was arrested for selling the book, and went to work amassing an army of intellectuals and critics to testify to its literary worth. Ginsberg, who had recently received news of his mother's death in a mental hospital, wanted little to do with the legal battle. He and Orlovsky left on an extended overseas vacation while the trial progressed.
Ferlinghetti's defense overwhelmed the censors; the book was declared to have literary merit, and thus could not be considered obscene.
The ramifications of this decision were tremendous; publishing houses such as Grove Press began dusting off works by such banned authors as Henry Miller and D. Beginning in , numerous novels and poetry collections by this circle of writers found their way into print, most notably Kerouac's On the Road in It became a sensation among the disaffected youth, but was harshly reviewed by most critics, including Truman Capote 's famous declaration that the book was not writing but typing.
By , Kerouac had added, among other titles, The Dharma Bums , which features Snyder as the main character. Snyder later published Riprap and the Cold Mountain Poems Also published in were Corso's nuclear ode, Bomb , and Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind , which, with Howl and Other Poems , is still one of the best-selling poetry books of all time. Through all this, Burroughs had been living and writing in the Moroccan city of Tangier.
It was because of the Beat Generation that people began to question the society they lived in and stepped out of it. The Beat Generation also set precedent for many important things such as the hippies and anti-war movement.
Not only that, they helped bring awareness and battle racism in American. People like Dizze Gillespie and Charlie Parker, two American American Musicians, were inspire to play Jazz music without the worries of racial barriers. Search this site.
Progression of American Society. What is the Beat Generation? Above, I referred to the Beat Generation as writers and this suggests that the Beat Generation was purely a literary movement. This begs the question: Were all young people in the late fifties part of the Beat Generation, or did you have to be an artist?
That is to say, was the Beat Generation a purely literary movement, or a wider cultural phenomenon, or was it a social thing — in other words, the friends of these three writers? The most obvious answer is that the Beat Generation was simply a literary movement , with Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac at the center, and thus the Beats were writers who published stories during a certain time frame in history, on certain themes and with a certain style.
This seems to be confirmed by something that Allen Ginsberg said in There is not beat poetry, or a beat novel, or beat painting. Beat is a poetic conception, an attitude toward the world. But, yes, we have done theater…. If it was more than a literary movement and if we are to view the Beat Generation as a group of people then it limits us to time and events, rather than themes and styles.
Therefore, perhaps it is most fitting to label as the Beat Generation a group of writers and thinkers surrounding Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs during the forties and fifties. The problem there, though, is that we are admitting that one could be Beat without having been a part of the Beat Generation by virtue of age or location.
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