Many people associate the Beat Generation of the first half of the 1950s with crime, delinquency, immorality, and amorality. Even some professors and critics feel sorry that the high ideal of the Beats became very degenerate in practice. Although the Beat Generation is all history now, it remains an important chapter in American literature.

It is Jack Kerouac who first used the term “Beat Generation” in his talk with John Clellon Holmes (1926-1988) about the implications of the Lost Generation and existentialism in 1948. The New York Times carried an article entitled “This Is the Beat Generation” in 1952. This is the origin of the term, though not all the Beats liked it. The word “Beat” is originally a jazz term for rhythm. When it applies to the Beats, the word is used as a pun. First of all, it can mean beaten down, destroyed, demolished. The Beats were beaten down. They were not wealthy people. They gave up good jobs and lived a very poor life. They preferred to beg rather than to work so that they had the experience of poverty. So they were beaten down. But in being beaten down they had an experience of beatitude, and beatitude means blessedness. So the shortened form of beatitude is beat, and thus “Beat” means “beatific”. The term itself carries the idea of mystical inspiration. “Beat” means being inspired with the wonder of life. In essence, the word “Beat” represents a nonconformist, rebellious spirit toward conventional values concerning sex, religion, education, politics, and the American way of life in general.

From “Beat” derives “Beats,” “Beatest,” “Beatific,” “Beatness,” “Beatniks,” and the related words such as  “Jazzniks,” “Bopniks,” “Bugniks,” and “Hippies.” Some terms used by the Beats carry special meanings. The word “hip” means “rise,” or “aware of advanced tastes.” A hipster is a person who rebels against conventions. So a hip person is a rebel against conventions. The word “cool” means very good, excellent or superior, for instance, cool jazz. The word “square” means conventional. To be square is to be rigid. A square is a rigid conformist who fits into a proper slot, does everything just right, conventional, probably dull, probably has no personality.

The Beat Generation was a generation of men and women in their teens and early twenties who affected an alienation from general society because they rejected conventional social and moral values. They emphasized the free expression of emotions. Their activities were marked by an experimental quest for new way of life. The Beat Generation was made up of Bohemians. A Bohemian is a person who lives an unconventional life style. Whitman was called a Bohemian. Bohemians in the 1950s included jazz musicians, artists, painters, and other kinds of writers. They were centered for the most part in San Francisco. They would often wander from place to place. There were groups of Beatniks living in New York and Boston. Some of them went to the small villages in Mexico so as to drop out from society. Some went to live along the beaches of southern California, and became beachcombers. Some went to the Rocky Mountains, way up into the little cabins in the woods. Some went to the smoky mountains of the American South, again going far away from urban civilization.

Many of the Beats lived in San Francisco for an economic reason. During 1934 and 1936, there had been workers’ strikes that were quite successful in San Francisco. They were successful in raising the wage level of manual laborers in that area. So San Francisco had a very high wage for people who did manual work; for people who did office work, the wage was not competitive to the rest of the country. Many of these young people would drop out of school, go to San Francisco where they could get very well-paid jobs, doing manual labor, construction, shipping, and some other kind of work. They would work for four months, or two months, earn enough money to live and then quit their jobs. Many artists did this. They worked for a month or so, had enough money to pay the rent and buy some food, then they would quit working, and they would devote their time to painting or writing. When they needed money, they would go back to work. San Francisco then was a good place for them to live. The climate was mild, so they did not have to worry about keeping their house, to worry about buying a winter coat.

The Beat Generation was a product of the time. Social and intellectual changes of the 1950s in America catalyzed the Beat Movement. The 1950s, the years of presidency of Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), were extremely conventional years. It was an era of easy compliance with authority. Men who had come back from serving in World War II were eager to start their families, to move out of the city into the suburbs. The 1950s also witnessed a widespread discontentment among the postwar generation. Its voice was one of protest against the frightened, conservative political mood created by Senator Joseph McCarthy (1909-1957), against the greedy, money ?seeking “ respectable” life of the dominant middle class, against the literary formalism of American writing after World War II. This was a time when many intellectuals tried to avoid controversies and hid safely inside colleges and research institutions as they believed that people were fighting a hopeless battle against everything. The general mood of the time was that of despair, and the Beat Movement was in essence a reaction to a dullness in the culture they felt at that time.

The Beat Generation was a social phenomenon rather than an artistic one. The great emphasis was on the way people lived, the way the Beats lived. They also produced important literature, but the rebellion in life style of these people was an important part of the time. Without any knowledge of the way they lived, people would not understand the literature they produced. The 1950s and early 1960s were in the social tradition of American romantic revolt. American romantic revolt means the individual as opposed to society. The basic trust was in the power of the individual, and anything that was done by society as a group was down-graded. The Beats just wanted to drop out from society. They did not accept any conventions or general rules because they believed that the power should go to the individual.

II.  Characteristics

1. The Beats were fed up with the official explanations of why things happened. They denied the ready-made interpretation of human behavior, and they were drawn to aspects of human experiences that were ignored by all the sciences or condemned by society. They protested against what they felt was an inadequate conception of the nature of man. They were not going to accept the given conditions but seek another way of conducting their lives with the kind of joy and illusion of freedom. They were drawn to the idea of breaking control and getting out of one’s ordinary head, partly for joy, partly for the sake of new perception.

2. The Beats rejected middle class values, commercialism, and conformity. They scorned the middle class by adopting an “unrespectable” way of life, growing their heir and beards very long, deliberately remaining poor and dressing like paupers, living in an unconventional and undisciplined way. They were enthusiastic for visionary states produced by religious meditation, sexual experience, jazz or drug. They wanted to get lost on drugs to enjoy a mystical experience. The Beats found nothing wrong with the use of drugs, a crime without a victim, and this is reflected in their literary works. The Beats accepted all forms of sexual behavior. This of course broke the codes of middle class life. The Beats had a great sense of the street because they held that street knowledge meant functioning in the world. To the Beats, madness was a kind of retreat for those who wanted to stay privately sane. The Beats liked Jazz which began in black society. To the Beats, jazz was “a call from the dark, it was the euphoria of joy, dance, let loose”. They would get high while they listened to jazz. The Beats were interested in excessive experiences, in the extreme, because they held that a man who puts himself outside the law is a man who puts himself into himself.

3. The Beats withdrew from politics and from the obligations of citizenship. By and large they were in favor of peace. They involved themselves in the civil rights and peace movements and in campus anti-“multiversity” free speech demonstrations. They did not support candidates for Congress. They did not work within a political system. They just did not care.

4. The Beats rejected universities and the academic tradition. They favored complete reliance on the individual efforts that they gave up on formal institutions. They preferred to learn and teach themselves instead of going to a school to receive a meaningless academic degree. They did not want to go to the universities to learn how to be a poet, but they wanted to go to the people. So it was a more democratic attitude. There is no positive or negative side of rejecting the university. For the most part it is healthy because the Beats did bring new life into American writing by going back to the people instead of staying in the university.

5. The Beats evolved a free, non-materialistic religion with no formal church, but based loosely on the teaching of Buddha, comprising love, gay, and anarchy. Their philosophy of life was based on Zen Buddhism, an oriental mysticism. It is an entire anti-rational form of Buddhism that stresses vegetation and personal inspiration rather than reading the sacred scriptures. So the emphasis of these people was mystical inspiration from meditation. They had a feeling for the holy and the sacred parts of life. They had a feeling of the presence of the divinity in the material world. This led to an attitude of a wonder and delight in life when they would reach a spiritual insight, a moment of illumination. Evidently, this draws from people like Thoreau and Whitman. Their objects of veneration were Whitman, Buddha, and Eastern religions generally.

6. The Beats regarded modern American life as so cruel, selfish, and impersonal that writers and artists were being driven to madness. They wanted to create an alternative, free, loving way of life, a “counterculture,” which could replace it. They were drawn in politically-minded onslaughts. The Beats read their outrageously critical poetry to the public in the coffee houses and bars. Poetry and jazz became very popular art forms in coffee houses first in San Francisco, New York, and then in Chicago and finally expanding to many small cities. Someone would play a guitar while the poets recited their poetry in turn. And the people in the room were drinking tea, or coffee, listening to the words of the poets. When it was over, everybody clapped and passed the basket and put in some small change as a thank-you for listening to their poems. They did not have a market for their poetry, so they would read it aloud to their friends, and sometimes they would print their poems on a hand press or they would make a small book of 10-20 pages and sell it for a few pennies.

III. Beat Writers

The most publicized literary expression of disaffection with “official” American life was made by the “Beat” writers. They counted Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) , Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972), and Henry Miller (1891-1980) among their immediate precursors. The beginning of the Beat Movement can be dated to a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in the fall of 1955. Kenneth Rexroth was master of the ceremonies. The readers included Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia (1927-), Michael McClure(1932-), Gary Snyder(1930-), Lew Welsh (1926- 1971), and Philip Whalen (1923-); with Neal Cassady (1926- 1968), Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti in audience. Except for Gregory Corso (1930-) and William Everson (1912-), all the major Beat poets were there. John Clellon Holme, Herbert Huncke, John Tytell, Carl Solomon, and Peter Orlovsky are also well-known names associated with the Beat Movement. Starting about 1957, Norman Mailer(1923-) became sympathetic to the Beat Movement.

This group of writers put on a concerted and well-publicized rebellion against “official” American life and culture. They struggled in their art and in their lives to discover valid responses in an anxious time without simply escaping in nihilism. In literature, they showed the renewed interest in Walt Whitman because Walt Whitman had broken all the conventional rules of his time and lived an exuberant life. The Beats rejected the constricting literary forms of their contemporary writers. Instead, they wanted to write with complete spontaneity and honesty, even if the effect was slap-dash. They preferred to express emotions “raw,” exactly as it was felt, rather than “cooked” through memory and translation into art.

In form and style Beat writings range from the oral “breath - length” line to a highly controlled prosody, but nearly all Beat writers followed the tradition of Ezra Pound. Beat poetry exhibits a high degree of improvisation, “cut-up” effects, a juxtaposition of seemly unrelated images, and an erotic orientation. Beat prose is characteristic of the disappearance of the “story line.” Beat literature uses new forms both in prose and in poetry. Their most enduring works are represented by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Willian Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in prose and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Pictures from the Gone World in poetry. Howl and On the Road became the pocket Bibles of the Beat Generation. The Beats were somewhat softened by the knocks of time and chose to live quietly in the more rebellious late 1950s and 1960s. They wrote happily like archangels “lying around in the woods gloomy and laughing, but at least devoted to life and not camping around rearranging social moral ideas etc.,” as Allen said.