The Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a literary movement started by a group of
authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and
politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was
published and popularized throughout the 1950s. Central elements of
Beat culture are rejection of standard narrative values, spiritual
quest, exploration of American and Eastern religions, rejection of
materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition,
experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and
exploration.[1][2]
Allen Ginsberg's
Howl
Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch
(1959) and Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
On the Road (1957) are among the best known
examples of Beat literature.[3] Both
Howl
Howl and
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch were the
focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize
publishing in the United States.[4][5] The members of the Beat
Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who
celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.
The core group of
Beat Generation
Beat Generation authors – Herbert Huncke, Allen
Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac – met
in 1944 in and around the
Columbia University
Columbia University campus in New York City.
Later, in the mid-1950s, the central figures (with the exception of
Burroughs and Carr) ended up together in San Francisco where they met
and became friends of figures associated with the San Francisco
Renaissance.
In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were
incorporated into the hippie and larger counterculture movements. Neal
Cassady, as the driver for Ken Kesey's bus Further, was the primary
bridge between these two generations. Allen Ginsberg's work also
became an integral element of early 1960s hippie culture.
Contents
1 Origin of name
2 Significant places
2.1 Columbia University
2.2 Times Square "Underworld"
2.3 Greenwich Village
2.4 San Francisco and the Six Gallery reading
2.5 Pacific Northwest
3 Significant figures
3.1 Gary Snyder
3.2 Neal Cassady
4 Women and the Beats
4.1 Sexuality
5 Culture and influences
5.1 Drug use
5.2 Romanticism
5.3 Early American sources
5.4 French surrealism
5.5 Modernism
6 Topics
6.1 "Beatniks"
6.2 "Hippies"
6.3 Literary legacy
6.4 Rock and pop music
7 Criticism
7.1 Internal criticism
8 The Beats comment on the Beat Generation
9 Films about the Beat Generation
10 See also
11 References
12 Sources
13 Further reading
13.1 Books
13.2 Archival resources
14 External links
Origin of name[edit]
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948 to
characterize a perceived underground, anti-conformist youth movement
in New York.[6] The name arose in a conversation with writer John
Clellon Holmes.
Kerouac
Kerouac allows that it was street hustler Herbert
Huncke who originally used the phrase "beat", in an earlier discussion
with him. The adjective "beat" could colloquially mean "tired" or
"beaten down" within the African-American community of the period and
had developed out of the image "beat to his socks",[7][8][9] but
Kerouac
Kerouac appropriated the image and altered the meaning to include the
connotations "upbeat", "beatific", and the musical association of
being "on the beat", and "the Beat to keep" from the Beat Generation
poem.[10]
Significant places[edit]
Columbia University[edit]
The origins of the
Beat Generation
Beat Generation can be traced to Columbia
University and the meeting of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Hal
Chase and others.
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac attended Columbia on a football
scholarship.[11] Though the beats are usually regarded as
anti-academic,[12][13][14] many of their ideas were formed in response
to professors like
Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. Classmates Carr
and Ginsberg discussed the need for a "New Vision" (a term borrowed
from W. B. Yeats), to counteract what they perceived as their
teachers' conservative, formalistic literary ideals.[citation needed]
Times Square "Underworld"[edit]
Burroughs had an interest in criminal behavior and got involved in
dealing stolen goods and narcotics. He was soon addicted to opiates.
Burroughs' guide to the criminal underworld (centered in particular
around New York's Times Square) was small-time criminal and
drug-addict Herbert Huncke. The Beats were drawn to Huncke, who later
started to write himself, convinced that he possessed a vital worldly
knowledge unavailable to them from their largely middle-class
upbringings.[citation needed]
Ginsberg was arrested in 1949. The police attempted to stop Ginsberg
while he was driving with Huncke, his car filled with stolen items
that Huncke planned to fence. Ginsberg crashed the car while trying to
flee and escaped on foot, but left incriminating notebooks behind. He
was given the option to plead insanity to avoid a jail term, and was
committed for 90 days to Bellevue Hospital, where he met Carl
Solomon.[15]
Carl Solomon was arguably more eccentric than psychotic. A fan of
Antonin Artaud, he indulged in self-consciously "crazy" behavior, like
throwing potato salad at a college lecturer on Dadaism. Solomon was
given shock treatments at Bellevue; this became one of the main themes
of Ginsberg's "Howl", which was dedicated to Solomon. Solomon later
became the publishing contact who agreed to publish Burroughs' first
novel Junky in 1953.[16]
Greenwich Village[edit]
Beat writers and artists flocked to
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village in New York City
in the late 1950s because of low rent and the 'small town' element of
the scene. Folksongs, readings and discussions often took place in
Washington Square Park.[17]
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg was a big part of the scene
in the Village, as was Burroughs, who lived at 69 Bedford Street.[18]
Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and other poets frequented many bars in
the area including the San Remo at 93 MacDougal Street on the
northwest corner of Bleeker, Chumley's, and Minetta Tavern.[18]
Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and other abstract
expressionists were also frequent visitors and collaborators of the
beats.[19]
Cultural critics have written about the transition of Beat culture in
the Village into the Bohemian hippie culture of the 1960s.[20]
San Francisco and the Six Gallery reading[edit]
See also: San Francisco Renaissance
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg had visited Neal and
Carolyn Cassady in San Jose,
California in 1954 and moved to San Francisco in August. He fell in
love with
Peter Orlovsky
Peter Orlovsky at the end of 1954 and began writing Howl.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of the new City Lights Bookstore, started to
publish the
City Lights Pocket Poets Series in 1955.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Kenneth Rexroth's apartment became a Friday night literary salon
(Ginsberg's mentor William Carlos Williams, an old friend of Rexroth,
had given him an introductory letter). When asked by Wally Hedrick[21]
to organize the Six Gallery reading, Ginsberg wanted Rexroth to serve
as master of ceremonies, in a sense to bridge generations.
Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen,
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg and
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder read on October 7, 1955, before 100 people (including
Kerouac, up from Mexico City). Lamantia read poems of his late friend
John Hoffman. At his first public reading Ginsberg performed the just
finished first part of Howl. It was a success and the evening led to
many more readings by the now locally famous Six Gallery
poets.[citation needed]
It was also a marker of the beginning of the Beat movement, since the
1956 publication of
Howl
Howl (City Lights Pocket Poets, no. 4) and its
obscenity trial in 1957 brought it to nationwide attention.[22][23]
The
Six Gallery reading
Six Gallery reading informs the second chapter of Kerouac's 1958
novel The Dharma Bums, whose chief protagonist is "Japhy Ryder", a
character who is actually based on Gary Snyder.
Kerouac
Kerouac was impressed
with Snyder and they were close for a number of years. In the spring
of 1955 they lived together in Snyder's
Mill Valley
.jpg/500px-Mill_Valley_City_Hall_(2016).jpg)
Mill Valley cabin. Most Beats
were urbanites and they found Snyder almost exotic, with his rural
background and wilderness experience, as well as his education in
cultural anthropology and Oriental languages. Lawrence Ferlinghetti
called him "the Thoreau of the Beat Generation."
As documented in the conclusion of The Dharma Bums, Snyder moved to
Japan in 1955, in large measure in order to intensively practice and
study Zen Buddhism. He would spend most of the next 10 years there.
Buddhism
.jpeg/476px-Gandhara_Buddha_(tnm).jpeg)
Buddhism is one of the primary subjects of The Dharma Bums, and the
book undoubtedly helped to popularize
Buddhism
Buddhism in the West and remains
one of Kerouac's most widely read books.[24]
Pacific Northwest[edit]
The Beats also spent time in the Northern Pacific Northwest including
Washington and Oregon.
Kerouac
Kerouac wrote about sojourns to Washington's
North Cascades in
The Dharma Bums
The Dharma Bums and On the Road.[25]
Reed College
Reed College in Portland, Oregon was also a locale for some of the
Beat poets.
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder studied anthropology there, Philip Whalen
attended Reed, and
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg held multiple readings on the campus
around 1955 and 1956.[26]
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder and
Philip Whalen
Philip Whalen were students
in Reed's calligraphy class taught by Lloyd J. Reynolds.[27]
Significant figures[edit]
External video
Discussion of biographies of Beat poets Jack Kerouac, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, and others, October 22, 1996, C-SPAN
Burroughs was introduced to the group by David Kammerer, who was in
love with Lucien Carr. Carr had befriended freshman
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg and
introduced him to Kammerer and Burroughs. Carr also knew Kerouac's
girlfriend Edie Parker, through whom
Burroughs met
Kerouac
Kerouac in 1944.
On August 13, 1944, Carr killed Kammerer with a Boy Scout knife in
Riverside Park in what he claimed later was self-defense.[28] He
waited,[citation needed] then dumped the body in the Hudson River,
later seeking advice from Burroughs, who suggested he turn himself in.
He then went to Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the weapon.[29]
Carr turned himself in the following morning and later pleaded guilty
to manslaughter.
Kerouac
Kerouac was charged as an accessory, and
Burroughs as
a material witness, but neither was prosecuted.
Kerouac
Kerouac wrote about
this incident twice in his own works: once in his first novel, The
Town and the City, and again in one of his last, Vanity of Duluoz. He
wrote a collaboration novel with Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled
in Their Tanks, concerning the murder.[29]
Gary Snyder[edit]
Poet
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder was an important member of the beat movement and is
widely regarded as a member of the
Beat Generation
Beat Generation circle of writers.
He was one of the poets who read at the famous Six Gallery reading,
and he was written about in one of Kerouac's most popular novels, The
Dharma Bums.[citation needed] Some critics argue that Snyder's
connection with the Beats is exaggerated and that he might better be
regarded as a member of the West Coast group the San Francisco
Renaissance, which developed independently.
Neal Cassady[edit]
Neal Cassady
Neal Cassady was introduced to the group in 1947, providing
inspiration to several of t[citation needed]he Beat authors. He became
something of a muse to Ginsberg; they had a romantic affair, and
Ginsberg became Cassady's personal writing-tutor. Kerouac's road trips
with Cassady in the late 1940s became the focus of his second novel,
On the Road. Cassady's verbal style is one of the sources of the
spontaneous, jazz-inspired rapping that later became associated with
"beatniks". Cassady impressed the group with the free-flowing style of
his letters, and
Kerouac
Kerouac cited them as a key influence on his
spontaneous prose style.[citation needed]
Women and the Beats[edit]
The female contemporaries of Kerouac, Ginsberg and
Burroughs were
intimately involved in the creation of Beat philosophy and literature,
and yet remain markedly absent from the mainstream interpretation of
the most important aspects and figures of the movement.[citation
needed]
Beat Generation
Beat Generation women who have been published include Edie Parker;
Joyce Johnson; Carolyn Cassady; Hettie Jones; Joanne Kyger; Harriet
Sohmers Zwerling; Diane DiPrima; and Ruth Weiss, who also made films.
Poet
Elise Cowen
Elise Cowen took her own life in 1963. Poet
Anne Waldman
Anne Waldman was less
influenced by the Beats than by Allen Ginsberg's later turn to [2].
Later, female poets emerged who claimed to be strongly influenced by
the Beats, including
Janine Pommy Vega in the 1960s,
Lotti Golden
Lotti Golden in
the late 1960s,[30]
Patti Smith
Patti Smith in the 1970s, and
Hedwig Gorski
Hedwig Gorski in the
1980s.[31][32]
Sexuality[edit]
One of the key beliefs and practices of the
Beat Generation
Beat Generation was free
love and sexual liberation,[33] which strayed from the Christian
ideals of American culture at the time.[34] Some Beat writers were
openly gay or bisexual, including two of the most prominent
(Ginsberg[35] and Burroughs[36]). Some met each other through gay
connections, including David Kammerer's interest in Lucien
Carr.[citation needed]
For authorities, one of the most contentious features of Ginsberg's
poem
Howl
Howl were lines about homosexual sex. William Burroughs' Naked
Lunch contains content dealing with same-sex relations and pedophilia.
Both works were unsuccessfully prosecuted for obscenity. Victory by
the publishers helped to curtail literary censorship in the United
States.[4][5]
Considered racy at the time, Kerouac's writings are now considered
mild.[citation needed]
On the Road
On the Road mentions Neal Cassady's bisexuality
without comment, while
Visions of Cody
Visions of Cody confronts it.[citation needed]
However, the first novel does show Cassady as frankly promiscuous.
Kerouac's novels feature an interracial love affair (The
Subterraneans), and group sex (The Dharma Bums). The relationships
among men in Kerouac's novels are predominantly homosocial.[37]
Culture and influences[edit]
Drug use[edit]
The original members of the
Beat Generation
Beat Generation used a number of different
drugs, including alcohol, marijuana, benzedrine, morphine, and later
psychedelic drugs such as peyote, Ayahuasca, and LSD.[38] They often
approached drugs experimentally, initially being unfamiliar with their
effects; their drug use was broadly inspired by intellectual interest
and many Beat writers felt their drug experiences enhanced creativity,
insight or productivity.[39] The use of drugs was a key influence on
many of the social events of the time that were personal to the Beat
generation.[40]
Romanticism[edit]
Gregory Corso
_-_Foto_Giovanni_Dall'Orto,_31-March-2008.jpg/440px-9019_-_Roma_-_Cimitero_acattolico_-_Tomba_Gregory_Corso_(1930-2001)_-_Foto_Giovanni_Dall'Orto,_31-March-2008.jpg)
Gregory Corso considered English Romantic poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley a
hero, and he was buried at the foot of Shelley's grave in the
Protestant Cemetery, Rome. Ginsberg mentions Shelley's poem Adonais at
the beginning of his poem Kaddish, and cites it as a major influence
on the composition of one of his most important poems. Michael McClure
compared Ginsberg's
Howl
Howl to Shelley's breakthrough poem Queen Mab.[41]
Ginsberg's main Romantic influence was William Blake,[42] and studied
him throughout his life. Blake was the subject of Ginsberg's
self-defining auditory hallucination and revelation in 1948.[43]
Romantic poet
John Keats
John Keats was also cited as an influence.[citation
needed]
Early American sources[edit]
The Beats were inspired by early American figures such as Henry David
Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Herman Melville
Herman Melville and especially Walt
Whitman, who is addressed as the subject of one of Ginsberg's most
famous poems, A Supermarket in California.
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was
occasionally acknowledged, and Ginsberg saw
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson as having
an influence on Beat poetry. The 1926 novel You Can't Win by outlaw
author Jack Black was cited as having a strong influence on
Burroughs.[44]
French surrealism[edit]
In many ways,
Surrealism
Surrealism was still considered a vital movement in the
1950s.
Carl Solomon introduced the work of French author Antonin
Artaud to Ginsberg, and the poetry of
André Breton
André Breton had direct
influence on Ginsberg's poem Kaddish.[citation needed] Rexroth,
Ferlinghetti,
John Ashbery
John Ashbery and
Ron Padgett translated French poetry.
Second-generation Beat
Ted Joans
Ted Joans was named "the only Afro-American
Surrealist" by Breton.[45]
Philip Lamantia introduced Surrealist poetry to the original
Beats.[46] The poetry of
Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso and
Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman shows the
influence of Surrealist poetry with its dream-like images and its
random juxtaposition of dissociated images, and this influence can
also be seen in more subtle ways in Ginsberg's poetry. As the legend
goes, when meeting French Surrealist Marcel Duchamp, Ginsberg kissed
his shoe and
Corso cut off his tie.[47][page needed] Other
influential French poets for the Beats were Guillaume Apollinaire,
Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire.[citation needed]
Modernism[edit]
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was the subject of a book-length study by Lew Welch.
Admitted influences for
Kerouac
Kerouac include Marcel Proust, Ernest
Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.[48]
Topics[edit]
A section devoted to the beat generation at a bookstore in Stockholm,
Sweden
While many authors claim to be directly influenced by the Beats, the
Beat Generation
Beat Generation phenomenon itself has had an influence on American
culture leading more broadly to the hippie movements of the
1960s.[citation needed]
In 1982, Ginsberg published a summary of "the essential effects" of
the Beat Generation:[49]
Spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation," i.e., gay
liberation, somewhat catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation,
Gray Panther activism.
Liberation of the world from censorship.
Demystification and/or decriminalization of cannabis 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, Janis Joplin, 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 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
Kerouac called (after Spengler) a "second
religiousness" developing within an advanced civilization.
Return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy vs. state regimentation.
Respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed
by
Kerouac
Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road: "The Earth is an Indian
thing."
"Beatniks"[edit]
Main article: Beatnik
The term "Beatnik" was coined by
Herb Caen
Herb Caen of the San Francisco
Chronicle on April 2, 1958, a portmanteau on the name of the recent
Russian satellite
Sputnik
Sputnik and Beat Generation. This suggested that
beatniks were (1) "far out of the mainstream of society" and (2)
"possibly pro-Communist."[50] Caen's term stuck and became the popular
label associated with a new stereotype—the man with a goatee and
beret reciting nonsensical poetry and playing bongo drums while
free-spirited women wearing black leotards dance.[citation needed]
An early example of the "beatnik stereotype" occurred in Vesuvio's (a
bar in North Beach, San Francisco) which employed the artist Wally
Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and
sandals, creating improvisational drawings and paintings. By 1958
tourists who came to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the
North Beach Beat scene, prophetically anticipating similar tours of
the
Haight-Ashbury
Haight-Ashbury district ten years later.[51]
A variety of other small businesses also sprang up exploiting (and/or
satirizing) the new craze. In 1959, Fred McDarrah started a
"Rent-a-Beatnik" service in New York, taking out ads in The Village
Voice and sending
Ted Joans
Ted Joans and friends out on calls to read
poetry.[52]
"Beatniks" appeared in many cartoons, movies, and TV shows of the
time, perhaps the most famous being the character
Maynard G. Krebs
Maynard G. Krebs in
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959–1963).
While some of the original Beats embraced the beatniks, or at least
found the parodies humorous (Ginsberg, for example, appreciated the
parody in the comic strip Pogo[53]) others criticized the beatniks as
inauthentic poseurs.
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac feared that the spiritual aspect of
his message had been lost and that many were using the Beat Generation
as an excuse to be senselessly wild.[54]
"Hippies"[edit]
Main article: Hippie
During the 1960s, aspects of the Beat movement metamorphosed into the
counterculture of the 1960s, accompanied by a shift in terminology
from "beatnik" to "hippie".[55] Many of the original Beats remained
active participants, notably Allen Ginsberg, who became a fixture of
the anti-war movement. Notably, however,
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac broke with
Ginsberg and criticized the 1960s politically radical protest
movements as an excuse to be "spiteful".[56]
There were stylistic differences between beatniks and hippies—somber
colors, dark sunglasses, and goatees gave way to colorful psychedelic
clothing and long hair. The beats were known for "playing it cool"
(keeping a low profile),[57]
Beyond style, there were 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.[58]
Literary legacy[edit]
Among the emerging novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, a few were
closely connected with Beat writers, most notably
Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey (One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest). Though they had no direct connection, other
writers considered the Beats to be a major influence, including Thomas
Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)[59] and
Tom Robbins
Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the
Blues).
William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs is considered a forefather of postmodern
literature; he also inspired the cyberpunk genre.[60][61][62]
One-time Beat writer LeRoi Jones/
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka helped initiate the
Black Arts movement.[63]
As there was focus on live performance among the Beats, many Slam
poets have claimed to be influenced by the Beats. Saul Williams, for
example, cites Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and
Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman as major
influences.[64]
The Postbeat Poets are direct descendants of the Beat Generation.
Their association with or tutelage under Ginsberg at The Naropa
University's
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics[65] and later
at
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College stressed the social-activist legacy of the Beats
and created its own body of literature. Known authors are Anne
Waldman, Antler, Andy Clausen, David Cope, Eileen Myles, Eliot Katz,
Paul Beatty, Sapphire, Lesléa Newman, Jim Cohn, Thomas R. Peters, Jr.
(poet and owner of beat book shop), Sharon Mesmer, Randy Roark, Josh
Smith, David Evans.[citation needed]
Rock and pop music[edit]
The Beats had a pervasive influence on rock and roll and popular
music, including the Beatles,
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. The Beatles
spelled their name with an "a" partly as a Beat Generation
reference,[66] and
John Lennon
John Lennon was a fan of Jack Kerouac.[67] The
Beatles even put Beat writer
William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs on the cover of
their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.[68] Ginsberg later
met and became friends of members of the Beatles, and Paul McCartney
played guitar on Ginsberg's album Ballad of the Skeletons.[citation
needed]
Ginsberg was a close friend of Bob Dylan[69] and toured with him on
the
Rolling Thunder Revue
Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. Dylan cites Ginsberg and
Kerouac
Kerouac as
major influences.[citation needed]
Jim Morrison
Jim Morrison cites
Kerouac
Kerouac as one of his biggest influences, and
fellow Doors member
Ray Manzarek
Ray Manzarek has said "We wanted to be
beatniks."[70] In his book Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors,
Manzarek also writes "I suppose if
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac had never written On
the Road,
The Doors
The Doors would never have existed."
Michael McClure
Michael McClure was
also a friend of members of The Doors, at one point touring with
Manzarek.
Ginsberg was a friend of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, a group of
which
Neal Cassady
Neal Cassady was a member, which also included members of the
Grateful Dead. In the 1970s,
Burroughs was a friend of Mick Jagger,
Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Patti Smith.[citation needed]
The musical group
Steely Dan
Steely Dan is named after a steam-powered dildo in
Burroughs' Naked Lunch. British progressive rock band
Soft Machine
Soft Machine is
named after Burroughs' novel The Soft Machine.[citation needed]
Singer-songwriter Tom Waits, a Beat fan, wrote "Jack and Neal" about
Kerouac
Kerouac and Cassady, and recorded "On the Road" (a song written by
Kerouac
Kerouac after finishing the novel) with Primus.[71] He later
collaborated with
Burroughs on the theatrical work The Black Rider.
Jazz musician/film composer
Robert Kraft
Robert Kraft (not to be confused with NFL
Team owner Robert Kraft) wrote and released a contemporary homage to
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac and
Beat Generation
Beat Generation aesthetics entitled "Beat Generation"
on the 1988 album Quake City.[citation needed]
Musician Mark Sandman, who was the bass guitarist, lead vocalist and a
former member of the alternative jazz rock band Morphine, was
interested in the
Beat Generation
Beat Generation and wrote a song called "Kerouac" as
a tribute to
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac and his personal philosophy and way of
life.[citation needed]
The band
Aztec Two-Step
Aztec Two-Step recorded "The Persecution & Restoration of
Dean Moriarty (On the Road)" in 1972.[72]
There was a resurgence of interest in the beats among bands in the
1980s. Ginsberg worked with the Clash and
Burroughs worked with Sonic
Youth, R.E.M., Kurt Cobain, and Ministry, among others.
Bono
Bono of U2
cites
Burroughs as a major influence,[73][74] and
Burroughs appeared
briefly in a U2 video in 1997.[75] Post-punk band
Joy Division
Joy Division named a
song "Interzone" after a collection of stories by Burroughs. Laurie
Anderson featured
Burroughs on her 1984 album
Mister Heartbreak
Mister Heartbreak and in
her 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave. The band King Crimson
produced the album Beat inspired by the Beat Generation.[citation
needed]
More recently, American artist
Lana Del Rey
.jpg/440px-Lana_Del_Rey_at_KROQ_Weenie_Roast_2017_(cropped).jpg)
Lana Del Rey references the Beat
movement and Beat poetry in her 2014 song "Brooklyn Baby".[citation
needed]
Criticism[edit]
The Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was met with scrutiny and assigned many
stereotypes. Several magazines, including Life and Playboy, depicted
members of the
Beat Generation
Beat Generation as nihilists and as unintellectual.
This criticism was largely due to the ideological differences between
American culture at the time and the Beat Generation, including their
Buddhist-inspired beliefs.[34]
Norman Podhoretz, a student at Columbia with
Kerouac
Kerouac and Ginsberg,
later became a critic of the Beats. His 1958
Partisan Review
Partisan Review article
"The Know-Nothing Bohemians" was a vehement critique primarily of
Kerouac's
On the Road
On the Road and The Subterraneans, as well as Ginsberg's
Howl.[76] His central criticism is that the Beat embrace of
spontaneity is bound up in an anti-intellectual worship of the
"primitive" that can easily turn toward mindlessness and violence.
Podhoretz asserted that there was a link between the Beats and
criminal delinquents.[citation needed]
Ginsberg responded in a 1958 interview with The Village Voice,[77]
specifically addressing the charge that the Beats destroyed "the
distinction between life and literature". In the interview, he stated
that "the bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had
the same education, went to the same school, you know there are
'Intellectuals' and there are intellectuals. Podhoretz is just out of
touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the
eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now—Proust,
Wolfe, Faulkner, Joyce."[78]
Internal criticism[edit]
In a 1974 interview,[79]
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder comments on the subject of
"casualties" of the Beat Generation:[80]
Kerouac
Kerouac was a casualty too. And there were many other casualties that
most people have never heard of, but were genuine casualties. Just as,
in the 60s, when Allen and I for a period there were almost publicly
recommending people to take acid. When I look back on that now I
realize there were many casualties, responsibilities to bear.
Author
Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell comments on the subject "about Eduardo
Sanguinetti" in the preface of Sanguinetti's Poetry and Philosophical
Essay Alter Ego:[81][82]
This is what the work of Sanguinetti shows us, in the form of a mirror
image. Or, to put it in less philosophical terms, Eduardo Sanguinetti,
like almost any other creator, has little understanding of what he is
going to do and only partially understands what he has done.
Sanguinetti in a way of contemplating the world and all his work,
whatever the medium, reveals this particular way. Sanguinetti is a
style. He is an extraordinarily coherent statement of a way of being
in the world.
The Beats comment on the Beat Generation[edit]
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process. If the page can be expanded into an encyclopedic article,
rather than a list of quotations, please do so and remove this
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Three writers do not a generation make.
— Gregory Corso[83]
(sometimes also attributed to Gary Snyder).
Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just
the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose.
— Allen Ginsberg[84]
Films about the Beat Generation[edit]
D.O.A. (1949)—a film noir, set in San Francisco, which includes one
of the earliest (fictional) depictions of the Beat culture
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac (wrote), Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie (directed) Pull
My Daisy (1958)
The Beat Generation* (1959) (motion picture)
A Bucket of Blood* (1959) Roger Corman Production
The Subterraneans* (1960) (motion picture)
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village Story* (1961)
Next Stop, Greenwich Village* (1976)
Heart Beat (1980) (motion picture)
What Happened to Kerouac? (1986) (documentary)
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch (1991) (motion picture)
Life and Times of
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg (1993) (documentary)
So I Married an Axe Murderer
So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993) (motion picture)
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg Live in London (1995) (documentary)
The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997)
The Source (1999) (documentary)
Beat (2000) (motion picture)
American Saint (2001) (dramatic motion picture) 90 minutes
Words of Advice:
William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs on the Road (2007)
Neal Cassady* (2007)
Crazy Wisdom: The
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
(2008)(documentary)
Howl
Howl (2010) (motion picture)
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (2010) (documentary)
Magic Trip
Magic Trip (2011) (documentary)
Big Sur (2012) (motion picture)
Corso: The Last Beat (2012) (documentary)
On the Road
On the Road (2012) (motion picture)
The Beat Hotel (2012) (documentary)
Kill Your Darlings (2013) (motion picture)
Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder (2013) (documentary)
See also[edit]
Beat Scene
Beatdom Literary Journal
European Beat Studies Network
Literary Kicks
San Francisco Oracle
Leonard Cohen, Canadian
Beat Generation
Beat Generation poet & songwriter
Christopher Felver
G.I. Generation
Silent Generation
References[edit]
^
The Beat Generation
The Beat Generation – Literature Periods & Movements.
^ Charters, Ann (2001). Beat Down to Your Soul: What was the Beat
Generation?. Penguin Books. ISBN 0141001518.
^ Charters (1992) The Portable Beat Reader.
^ a b Ann Charters, introduction, to Beat Down to Your Soul, Penguin
Books (2001) ISBN 978-0-14100-151-7 p. xix "[...] the conclusion
of the obscenity trial in San Francisco against Lawrence Ferlinghetti
for publishing Ginsberg's
Howl
Howl and Other Poems [...] in which Judge
Clayton W. Horn concluded for the defendant that 'Howl' had what he
called 'redeeming social content.'", p. xxxiii "After the successful
Howl
Howl trial, outspoken and subversive literary magazines sprung up like
wild mushrooms throughout the United States."
^ a b Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw, New York: Avon, 1988. p. 347, trade
paper edition ISBN 0-380-70882-5: "The ruling on
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch in
effect marked the end of literary censorship in the United States."
^ "Beat movement (American literary and social movement) --
Encyclopædia Britannica". britannica.com. Retrieved 2014-11-30.
^ "Beat to his socks, which was once the black's most total and
despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the
Beat Generation..." James Baldwin, "If Black English Isn't a Language,
Then Tell Me, What is it?," The New York Times, July 29, 1979.
^ "The word 'beat' was primarily in use after World War II by jazz
musicians and hustlers as a slang term meaning down and out, or poor
and exhausted. The jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow combined it with other
words, like 'dead beat' ..." Ann Charters, The Portable Beat reader,
1992, ISBN 0-670-83885-3, ISBN 978-0-670-83885-1.
^ "Hebert Huncke picked up the word [beat] from his show business
friends on of Near North Side of Chicago, and in the fall of 1945 he
introduced the word to William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack
Kerouac." Steve Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation" (1995), p.
3, ISBN 0-375-70153-2.
^ The exuberance is much stronger in the published On the Road, than
in its manuscript (in scroll-form). Luc Sante: "In the scroll the use
of the word "holy" must be 80 percent less than in the novel, and
psalmodic references to the author's unique generation are down by at
least two-thirds; uses of the word "beat", for that matter, clearly
favor the exhausted over the beatific." New York Times
Book
Book Review,
August 19, 2007.
^ Beard, Rick, and Leslie Berlowitz. 1993. Greenwich Village: Culture
and Counterculture. New Brunswick, N.J. Published for the Museum of
the City of New York by Rutgers University Press. 167.
^ "In this essay "Beat" includes those American poets considered
avant-garde or anti-academic from c. 1955 – 1965.", Lee Hudson,
"Poetics in Performance: The Beat Generation" collected in Studies in
interpretation, Volume 2, ed Esther M. Doyle, Virginia Hastings Floyd,
1977, Rodopi, ISBN 90-6203-070-X, 9789062030705, p. 59.
^ "... resistance is bound to occur in bringing into the academy such
anti-academic writers as the Beats.", Nancy McCampbell Grace, Ronna
Johnson, Breaking the rule of cool: interviewing and reading women
beat writers, 2004, Univ. Press of Mississippi,
ISBN 1-57806-654-9, ISBN 978-1-57806-654-4, p. x.
^ "The Black Mountain school originated at the sometime Black Mountain
College of Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1950s and gave rise to an
anti-academic academy that was the center of attraction for many of
the disaffiliated writers of the period, including many who were known
in other contexts as the Beats or the Beat generation and the San
Francisco school." Steven R. Serafin, Alfred Bendixen, The Continuum
Encyclopedia of American Literature, 2005, Continuum International
Publishing Group, ISBN 0-8264-1777-9,
ISBN 978-0-8264-1777-0, p. 901.
^ Morgan, Literary Outlaw (1988), pp. 163–165.
^ Morgan, Literary Outlaw (1988), pp 205–6.
^ McDarrah, Fred W., and Gloria S. McDarrah. 1996. Beat Generation:
Glory Days in Greenwich Village. New York: Schirmer Books.
^ a b Beard and Berlowitz. 1993. Greenwich Village. "The Beat
Generation in the Village." 165–198.
^ Beard and Berlowitz. 1993. Greenwich Village. "The Beat Generation
in the Village." 170.
^ Beard and Berlowitz. 1993. Greenwich Village. "The Beat Generation
in the Village." 178.
^ Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the
Making of the Beat Generation: "Wally Hedrick, a painter and veteran
of the Korean War, approached Ginsberg in the summer of 1955 and asked
him to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery.... At first,
Ginsberg refused. But once he’d written a rough draft of Howl, he
changed his 'fucking mind,' as he put it."
^ Ginsberg, Allen. Howl. 1986 critical edition edited by Barry Miles,
Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Fully
Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of
First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts &
Bibliography ISBN 0-06-092611-2 (pbk.)
^ McClure, Michael. Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision
from Blake to Kerouac. Penguin, 1994. ISBN 0-14-023252-4.
^ Bradley J. Stiles, Emerson's contemporaries and Kerouac's crowd: a
problem of self-location, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003,
ISBN 0-8386-3960-7, ISBN 978-0-8386-3960-3, p. 87: "Although
Kerouac
Kerouac did not introduce Eastern religion into American culture, his
writings were instrumental in popularizing
Buddhism
Buddhism among mainstream
intellectuals."
^ "Pacific Northwest Seasons: Ross Lake: Paddling in the Path of Beat
Poets". pacificnwseasons.blogspot.com. Retrieved 2014-11-30.
^ "Reed Magazine: When the Beats Came Back (1/6)". reed.edu. Retrieved
2014-11-30.
^ "Reed Digital Collections : Search Results". cdm.reed.edu.
Retrieved 2014-11-30.
^ Knight, Brenda, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists
and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution, 978-1573241380, Conari Press,
1998.
^ a b Kakutani, Michiko (2008-11-10). "A Jack Kerouac-William S.
Burroughs Collaboration: 'And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks'".
The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
^ PATH (May 29, 2008). 1969 "Lotti Golden- Motor-Cycle", Delorean,
Tiny Mix Tapes.
^ *"Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on March
28, 2012. Retrieved 2011-10-10. TV interview 1982 poets Hedwig
Gorski and
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley discuss Beats.
Special
Special
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley issue,
Turkey.
^ [1] Interview 2013 by Greece Blues site Michalis Limnios BLUES @
GREECE.
^ Morgan, Bill (2011). The Type Writer Is Holy: The Complete,
Uncensored History of the Beat Generation. Berkeley, CA:
Counterpoint.
^ a b Prothero, Stephen (1991). "On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement
as Spiritual Protest". The Harvard Theological Review. 84: 205–222
– via JSTOR.
^ Hemmer, Kurt, ed. (2007). Encyclopedia of Beat Literature. Facts On
File, Inc. p. 111. ISBN 0-8160-4297-7. These early books,
too, are windows into the poet's efforts to find a place for his
homosexual identity in the repressive pre-Stonewall United
States.
^ Hemmer, Kurt, ed. (2007). Encyclopedia of Beat Literature. Facts On
File, Inc. p. 32. ISBN 0-8160-4297-7. And then, before the
end of the decade,
Burroughs had gone—leaving cold-war America to
escape his criminalization as a homosexual and drug addict, to begin
25 years of expatriation.
^ "Hetero- and Homo-Social Relationships in Jack Kerouac's On the
Road". Not-So-Gentle Reader blog. July 23, 2009. Retrieved
2014-11-30. [permanent dead link]
^ Lundberg, John (2011-10-16). "The Great Drug-Induced Poems".
Huffington Post. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
^ Allen Ginsberg, The Essential Ginsberg, Penguin UK, 2015.
^ "Substance Use". Beatdom. 2010-09-14. Retrieved 2017-09-12.
^ McClure, Michael. Scratching the Beat Surface.
^ "Throughout these interviews [in Spontaneous Mind] Ginsberg returns
to his high praise of
William Blake
William Blake and Walt Whitman. Ginsberg
obviously loves Blake the visionary and Whitman the democratic
sensualist, and indeed Ginsberg's own literary personality can be
construed as a union of these forces." Edmund White, Arts and letters
(2004), p. 104, ISBN 1-57344-195-3, ISBN 978-1-57344-195-7.
^ "Ginsberg's intense relationship to Blake can be traced to a
seemingly mystical experience he had during the summer of 1948." ibid,
p. 104.
^ Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw (1988), p.36-37 of trade paper edition,
"When Billy [William Burroughs] was thirteen, he came across a book
that would have an enormous impact on his life and work. Written by
someone calling himself Jack Black, You Can't Win was the memoirs of a
professional thief and drug addict."
^ According to William Lawlor: "André Breton, the founder of
surrealism and Joans's [sic] mentor and friend, famously called Joans
the 'only Afro-American surrealist' (qtd. by James Miller in
_Dictionary of Literary Biography_ 16: 268)", p. 159, Beat culture:
lifestyles, icons, and impact, ABC-CLIO, 2005,
ISBN 1-85109-400-8, ISBN 978-1-85109-400-4. Ted Joans
himself said: "The late
André Breton
André Breton the founder of surrealism said
that I was the only Afro-American surrealist and welcomed me to the
exclusive surrealist group in Paris", p. 102, For Malcolm: poems on
the life and the death of Malcolm X, Dudley Randall and Margaret G.
Burroughs, eds, Broadside Press, Detroit, 1967. There is some question
about how familiar Breton was with Afro-American literature: "If it is
true that the late André Breton, a founder of the surrealist
movement, considered
Ted Joans
Ted Joans the only Afro-American surrealist, he
apparently had not read Kaufman; at any rate, Breton had much to learn
about Afro-American poetry." Bernard W. Bell, "The Debt to Black
Music", Black World/Negro Digest March 1973, p. 86.
^
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg commented: "His interest in techniques of surreal
composition notoriously antedates mine and surpasses my practice ... I
authoritatively declare Lamantia an American original, soothsayer even
as Poe, genius in the language of Whitman, native companion and
teacher to myself." Allen Ginsberg, Bill Morgan, Deliberate Prose:
Selected Essays 1952–1995, p. 442, "Philip Lamantia, Lamantia As
Forerunner", HarperCollins, 2001, ISBN 9780060930813.
^ Miles (2001) Ginsberg.
^ "In 'Author's Introduction,' which is included in Lonesome Traveler
(1960),
Kerouac
Kerouac ... goes on to mention Jack London, William Saroyan,
and
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway as early influences and mentions
Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe as
a subsequent influence." William Lawlor, Beat culture: lifestyles,
icons, and impact, 2005, ISBN 1-85109-400-8,
ISBN 978-1-85109-400-4 p. 153. "And if one considers The Legend
of Dulouz, one must acknowledge the influence of Marcel Proust. Like
Proust,
Kerouac
Kerouac makes his powerful memory the source of much of his
writing and again like Proust,
Kerouac
Kerouac envisions his life's literary
output as one great book." Lawlor, p. 154.
^ Ginsberg, Allen A Definition of the Beat Generation, from Friction,
1 (Winter 1982), revised for Beat Culture and the New America:
1950–1965.
^
Herb Caen
Herb Caen (February 6, 1997). "Pocketful of Notes". San Francisco
Chronicle. sfgate.com. Retrieved 2010-01-30. "...Look magazine,
preparing a picture spread on S.F.'s
Beat Generation
Beat Generation (oh, no, not
AGAIN!), hosted a party in a No. Beach house for 50 Beatniks, and by
the time word got around the sour grapevine, over 250 bearded cats and
kits were on hand, slopping up Mike Cowles' free booze. They're only
Beat, y'know, when it comes to work ..."
^ William T. Lawlor (ed.), Beat Culture: Lifestyles, Icons and Impact,
p. 309.
^ Arthur and Kit Knight (ed.), The Beat Vision, New York: Paragon
House, 1987, p. 281.
^ Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile.
^ "Tracing his personal definition of the term Beat to the fufillments
offered by beatitude,
Kerouac
Kerouac scorned sensationalistic phrases like
'Beat mutiny' and 'Beat insurrection,' which were being repeated ad
nauseam in media accounts. 'Being a Catholic,' he told conservative
journalist William F. Buckley, Jr. in a late-sixties television
appearance, 'I believe in order, tenderness, and piety,'" David
Sterritt, Screening the Beats: media culture and the Beat sensibility,
2004, p. 25, ISBN 0-8093-2563-2, ISBN 978-0-8093-2563-4.
^
Ed Sanders
Ed Sanders said in an interview in the film The Source (1999) (at
the 1hr 17secs point) that he observed the change immediately after
the 1967
Human Be-In
Human Be-In event: "And right after the Be-In all of a sudden
you were no longer a beatnik, you were a hippie." Similar remarks by
Sanders: an interview with Jessa Piaia in SQUAWK Magazine, Issue #55,
commented: "I've begun Tales of
Beatnik
Beatnik Glory, Volume 3. Set in the
Hippie
Hippie era, it defines that delicate time when reporters no longer
called us 'Beatnik,' but started to call us 'Hippie.'",
http://www.angelfire.com/music/squawk/eds2.html; "There was a big
article January of 1966, on page one of the Cleveland Plain Dealer,
under the heading '
Beatnik
Beatnik Leader Wants Marijuana.' It was just before
"hippie" replaced 'Beatnik.'" Ed Sanders, Larry Smith, Ingrid
Swanberg, D.A. Levy & the mimeograph revolution (2007).
^ Gore Vidal quotes Ginsberg speaking of Kerouac: "'You know around
1968, when we were all protesting the Vietnam War, Jack wrote me that
the war was just an excuse for 'you Jews to be spiteful again.'" Gore
Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir, 1995, ISBN 0-679-44038-0.
^ For example, see the meaning of "cool" as explained in the Del
Close, John Brant spoken word album
How to Speak Hip
_cover_art.jpg)
How to Speak Hip from 1959.
^
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg comments on this in the film "The Source" (1999);
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder discusses the issue in a 1974 interview, collected in The
Beat Vision (1987), Paragon House. ISBN 0-913729-40-X;
ISBN 0-913729-41-8 (pbk), edited by Arthur Winfield Knight: "...
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 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 ..."
^ Pynchon, Thomas. Slow Learner. Vintage Classics, 2007.
ISBN 0-09-953251-4.
^ "Sterling also identifies [in Mirroshades (1986)] postmodernist
authors
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon and
William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs as forerunners of
cyberpunk." Keith Booker, Anne-Marie Thomas, The Science Fiction
Handbook, 2009, p. 111, ISBN 1-4051-6205-8,
ISBN 978-1-4051-6205-0.
^ "... it should hardly be surprising that to discover that the work
of William S
Burroughs had a profound impact on both punk music and
cyberpunk science fiction." Larry McCaffery, Storming the reality
studio: a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern science fiction, 1991,
p. 305.
^ "
Cyberpunk
.jpg/692px-Cyberpunk_city_(4065413356).jpg)
Cyberpunk writers acknowledge their literary debt to
Burroughs and
Pynchon, as well as to New Wave writers from the 1960s and 1970s such
as J. G. Ballard and Samuel Delany.", Jenny Wolmark, Aliens and
others: science fiction, feminism and postmodernism, 1994,
ISBN 0-87745-447-7, ISBN 978-0-87745-447-2.
^ "(LeRoi Jones) ... is best known as a major cultural leader, one of
the African American writers who galvanized a second Black
Renaissance, the
Black Arts Movement of the 1960s ..." – page xi,
"Preface", Komozi Woodard, A nation within a nation: Amiri Baraka
(LeRoi Jones) and Black power politics (1999, UNC Press),
ISBN 0-8078-4761-5, ISBN 978-0-8078-4761-9.
^ Williams, Saul. Said the Shotgun to the Head. MTV, 2003, p.184,
ISBN 0-7434-7079-6.
^ "During the eighties, Ginsberg used his position as director of the
writing department at Naropa, introduced his classes to the wide range
of literature of the Beat Generation. Many of his students became
poets and educators and are grouped together under an entirely new
category that has been labeled Postbeat Poets." Bill Morgan, William
Morgan, The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of
the Beat Generation, 2010, p. 245, ISBN 1-4165-9242-3,
ISBN 978-1-4165-9242-6.
^ "... the name Beatles comes from 'Beat' ..." Regina Weinreich,
"Books: The Birth of the Beat Generation", The Sunday New York Times
Book
Book Review, January 11, 1996; a review of Steven Watson's THE BIRTH
OF THE BEAT GENERATION: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters 1944–1960.
^ Ellis Amburn describes a telephone conversation with Jack Kerouac:
"
John Lennon
John Lennon subsequently contacted Kerouac, revealing that the band's
name was derived from 'Beat.' 'He was sorry he hadn't come to see me
when they played Queens,'
Kerouac
Kerouac said, referring to the Beatles Shea
Stadium concert in 1965." Amburn, Ellis, Subterranean Kerouac: The
Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac, p. 342, ISBN 0-312-20677-1.
^ Weidman, Rich (2015).
The Beat Generation
The Beat Generation FAQ: All That's Left to
Know About the Angelheaded Hipsters. Backbeat Books.
^ Wills, D. "Father & Son:
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan," in
Wills, D. (ed.), Beatdom Vol. 1 (Mauling Press: Dundee, 2007), pp.
90-93
^ "As
Ray Manzarek
Ray Manzarek recalls when Morrison was studying at UCLA: 'He
certainly had a substantial investment in books. They filled an entire
wall of his apartment. His reading was very eclectic. It was typical
of the early- to mid-sixties hipster student. [...] And lots of
Beatniks. We wanted to _be_ beatniks. But we were too young. We came a
little too late, but we were worshippers of the Beat Generation. All
the Beat writers filled Morrison's shelves [...]' (Manzarek 1999, 77)"
Sheila Whiteley, Too much too young: popular music, age and gender
(2005, Routledge)
^ "
Tom Waits
Tom Waits - The Pursuit of the Beats". www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk.
Retrieved 2017-09-12.
^ "Aztec Two-Step". Discogs. Retrieved May 30, 2015.
^
Bono
Bono comments approvingly on the
Burroughs cut up method: "That's
what the
Burroughs cut up method is all about. You cut up the past to
find the future." As quoted by John Geiger in Nothing is true –
everything is permitted: the life of Brion Gysin, p. 273, attributed
to John Waters, Race of the Angels: The Genesis of U2 (London, Fourth
Estate, 1994), ISBN 1-85702-210-6 ISBN 978-1857022100.
^ "... author WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS, 84, whose nihilistic novels have
influenced U2 front man BONO ... ", Martha Pickerill, Time, June 2,
1997.
^ "The next video, Last Night on Earth was shot in Kansas City, with
beat author
William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs making a cameo." p. 96 David
Kootnikoff, U2: A Musical Biography (2010) ISBN 0-313-36523-7,
ISBN 978-0-313-36523-2.
^ Collected in The
Norman Podhoretz
Norman Podhoretz Reader by Norman Podhoretz, Thomas
L. Jeffers, Paul Johnson. Free Press, 2007.
ISBN 978-1-4165-6830-8.
^ In: Spontaneous Mind.
^ Ginsberg, Allen, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958–1996,
p. 5, ISBN 0-06-093082-9.
^ Knight, Arthur Winfield. Ed. The Beat Vision (1987), Paragon House.
ISBN 0-913729-40-X; ISBN 0-913729-41-8 (pbk).
^ Charters (2001) Beat Down to Your Soul.
^ Sanguinetti, Eduardo. Pentland (1987). ISBN 0946270171,
9780946270170 (pbk)
^ Sanguinetti, E. (1986). Alter Ego. Pentland.
ISBN 9780946270170. Retrieved 2014-11-30.
^ Lerner, Richard and Lewis MacAdams, directors "What Ever Happened to
Kerouac?" (1985).
^ Burns, Glen Great Poets Howl: A Study of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry,
1943–1955, ISBN 3-8204-7761-6.
Sources[edit]
Charters, Ann (ed.) (1992) The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books.
ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk). The table
of contents is online.
Charters, Ann (ed.) (2001) Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat
Generation? NY: Penguin, 2001. ISBN 0-14-100151-8
Knight, Arthur Winfield. Ed. The Beat Vision (1987) Paragon House.
ISBN 0-913729-40-X; ISBN 0-913729-41-8 (pbk)
Espartaco Carlos. Eduardo Sanguinetti: The Experience of Limits.
Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone, 1989, Buenos Aires. paperback – trade
edition, 112 pages, English – Spanish, ISBN 950-9004-98-7
Knight, Brenda. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and
Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. ISBN 1-57324-138-5
McClure, Michael. Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision
from Blake to Kerouac. Penguin, 1994. ISBN 0-14-023252-4
Miles, Barry (2001). Ginsberg: A Biography. London: Virgin Publishing
Ltd., paperback, 628 pages, ISBN 0-7535-0486-3
Morgan, Ted (1983) Literary Outlaw The Life and Times of William S.
Burroughs. ISBN 0-380-70882-5, first printing, trade paperback
edition Avon, NY, NY
Phillips, Lisa. Beat Culture and the New America 1950–1965 published
by the Whitney Museum of American Art in accordance with an exhibition
in 1995/1996. ISBN 0-87427-098-7 softcover.
ISBN 2-08-013613-5 hardcover (Flammarion)
Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making
of the Beat Generation. University of California Press, 2004.
ISBN 0-520-24015-4
Starer, Jacqueline. Les écrivains de la
Beat Generation
Beat Generation éditions
d'écarts Dol de Bretagne France. 1SBN 978-2-919121-02-1
Further reading[edit]
Books[edit]
Campbell, James. This Is the Beat Generation: New York–San
Francisco-Paris. LA: University of California Press, 2001.
ISBN 0-520-23033-7
Collins, Ronald & Skover, David. Mania: The Story of the Outraged
& Outrageous Lives that Launched a Cultural Revolution (Top-Five
Books, March 2013)
Cook, Bruce The Beat Generation: The tumultuous '50s movement and its
impact on today. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971.
ISBN 0-684-12371-1.
Espartaco, Carlos Eduardo Sanguinetti: The Experience of Limits.
Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone. Buenos Aires, Argentine, 1989.
ISBN 950-9004-98-7
Gifford, Barry and Lawrence Lee Jack's
Book
Book An Oral Biography Of Jack
Kerouac, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978. ISBN 0-312-43942-3
Gorski, Hedwig. * [3]
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley 1982 TV Interview with Hedwig
Gorski transcript included in special
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley Issue, Journal of
American Studies of Turkey (JAST), No. 27, Spring 2008.
Grace, Nancy
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ISBN 1-4039-6850-0
Hemmer, Kurt (ed.). Encyclopedia of Beat Literature. Facts on File,
2006. ISBN 0-8160-4297-7
Hrebeniak, Michael. Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form,
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2006.
Johnson, Ronna C. and Nancy Grace. Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing
the Beat Generation. Rutgers, 2002. ISBN 0-813-53064-4
Knight, Brenda. Women of the Beat Generation; The Writers, Artists,
and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. General Books LLC, 2010.
ISBN 1153571900 ISBN 978-1153571906
McDarrah, Fred W., and Gloria S. McDarrah. Beat Generation: Glory Days
in
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village Schirmer Books (September 1996)
ISBN 0-8256-7160-4
McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation,
and America. NY: DeCapo, 2003. ISBN 0-306-81222-3
Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg,
Burroughs &
Corso in
Paris, 1957–1963. NY: Grove Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8021-3817-9
Peabody, Richard. A Different Beat: Writing by Women of the Beat
Generation. Serpent's Tail, 1997. ISBN 1852424311 /
ISBN 978-1852424312
Sargeant, Jack. Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. NY: Soft Skull, 2009 (third
edition)
Sanguinetti, Eduardo. Alter Ego. Edinburgh: Pentland, 1986.
ISBN 0946270171, 9780946270170
Sanders, Ed. Tales of
Beatnik
Beatnik Glory (second edition, 1990)
ISBN 0-8065-1172-9
Theado, Matt (ed.). The Beats: A Literary Reference. NY: Carrol &
Graff, 2002. ISBN 0-7867-1099-3
Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels,
and Hipsters, 1944–1960. NY: Pantheon, 1998. ISBN 0-375-70153-2
Archival resources[edit]
Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso Papers, 1981–1990 (1.5 linear feet) are housed at the
Stanford University Libraries
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Papers, 1919–2003 (circa 28 linear feet) are
housed at the
University of California at Berkeley
University of California at Berkeley Bancroft Library
Photographs from the
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Papers, circa 1935-circa
1990 (circa 345 photographs) are housed at the University of
California at Berkeley Bancroft Library.
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg Papers, 1937–1994 (circa 1,000 linear feet) are
housed at Stanford University Libraries
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac Papers, 1920–1977, bulk (1935–1969) (22.5 linear
feet) are housed at the
New York Public Library
New York Public Library Henry W. and Albert A.
Berg Collection of English and American Literature.
External links[edit]
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Vanity of Duluoz
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Related articles
Beatnik
Beat Generation
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