Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

“The Beat Generation is no longer about poetry. The Beat Generation is now about everything,” wrote the poet Gregory Corso in a prescient 1959 essay “Variations on a Generation” (quoted in Charters: 183). By then, the important literary works by which the Beat Generation was defined as a countercultural movement had already made their mark: poet Allen Ginsberg had inaugurated his epic “Howl” at the pivotal Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, novelist Jack Kerouac had published his On the Road to a dazzling rave review in the New York Times , and satirist William S. Burroughs had unleashed his Naked Lunch , horrifying the conservative, repressive culture at large, which wished to stifle its “obscenities.” Characterized by spontaneity, an unwillingness to revise, an anarchist spirit, and the influence of jazz music, these works were outrageous compared to the staid formalism of mainstream American literature. Corso's claim that the Beats were “about everything” was perhaps supported by the extent to which literature and writers were equally famous for a “hip,” disaffected lifestyle featuring unmannerly, “up-yours” behavior, irreverence, and sloppiness. The Beat avant-garde was so embedded in the zeitgeist its imagery had melded with the cultural images at large. In movies, disaffected Marlon Brando/ The Wild One (1953) and James Dean/ Rebel Without a Cause (1955) were hipster ... log in or subscribe to read full text