What Was the Beat Generation?

Where the Beat Generation began

The movement started in New York, not San Francisco. In 1944 a circle formed in and around Columbia University: Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr were students there, Jack Kerouac had arrived on a football scholarship, and William S. Burroughs and the Times Square hustler Herbert Huncke joined the group. Ginsberg and Carr talked about a ’New Vision’, borrowing the phrase from W. B. Yeats, as an answer to what they saw as the conservative literary taste of their teachers. That same August, Carr killed David Kammerer in Riverside Park; Kerouac and Burroughs were briefly drawn into the case as witnesses but were never prosecuted.

The friends spent the next decade writing largely unpublished work. John Clellon Holmes’s novel Go (1952), drawn from his friendships with Kerouac, Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, is usually considered the first Beat novel, and Burroughs’s Junkie followed in 1953. Meanwhile Kerouac typed the first draft of On the Road in 1951, but it would wait six years for a publisher. Wider recognition came only in the mid-1950s, once Ginsberg and others had moved west and the scene found a public stage in San Francisco.

Who coined the term ’Beat Generation’?

Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase ’Beat Generation’ in 1948, in a conversation with John Clellon Holmes. The word ’beat’ itself came from Herbert Huncke, for whom it was street slang meaning tired or beaten down. Kerouac stretched it to include ’upbeat’, ’beatific’ and the musical sense of being on the beat, which gave the label a spiritual as well as a weary edge.

Holmes brought the term to a wide audience with his essay ’This Is the Beat Generation’, published in The New York Times Magazine on 16 November 1952, in which he credited Kerouac with the word. Gregory Corso later objected that three writers could hardly make up a generation, a reminder that the label was always looser than the group it described.

The San Francisco Renaissance and Howl

Ginsberg moved to San Francisco in 1954, where an existing literary scene, the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, had grown around the older poet Kenneth Rexroth. On 7 October 1955 Rexroth acted as master of ceremonies at a reading at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street, where Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder and Ginsberg read. Ginsberg gave the first public reading of part one of ’Howl’, with Kerouac in the audience. The evening is widely regarded as the public birth of the Beat Generation, and Kerouac later fictionalised it in The Dharma Bums (1958).

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Bookstore, was also in the audience, and within hours of the reading he asked Ginsberg for the manuscript. Ferlinghetti had launched the City Lights Pocket Poets series in 1955, and he published Howl and Other Poems in 1956 as number four in the series. The small paperback put the Six Gallery poets into print and made City Lights the movement’s West Coast home.

The Howl obscenity trial of 1957

In March 1957 US Customs in San Francisco seized 520 copies of Howl and Other Poems, which had been printed in London. That June, undercover police bought a copy at City Lights; the shop’s manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, was arrested for selling it and Ferlinghetti for publishing it. Defended with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, the case, The People of the State of California v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, drew testimony from critics, academics and poets.

On 3 October 1957 Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem had ’redeeming social importance’ and was not obscene. The trial brought ’Howl’ national attention far beyond poetry readers. Together with the later case over Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, which a Massachusetts court first found obscene before the state’s Supreme Judicial Court reversed the ruling in 1966, it helped to loosen literary censorship in the United States.

On the Road and the ’beatnik’

Kerouac typed the first draft of On the Road in three weeks in April 1951, on a roughly 120-foot scroll of taped-together paper. Viking Press published a revised version on 5 September 1957, and Gilbert Millstein’s review in The New York Times hailed it as a major novel. Its characters were thinly veiled portraits of Kerouac’s circle: the narrator Sal Paradise stands in for Kerouac, and Dean Moriarty is based on Neal Cassady.

Fame brought caricature. On 2 April 1958 the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen coined ’beatnik’, blending ’Sputnik’ with ’Beat Generation’. The stereotype that followed, of goatees, berets and bongo drums, was spread by magazines, films and television, and often had little to do with the writing. Life and Playboy portrayed the Beats as nihilistic and unintellectual, while television gave the world the comic beatnik Maynard G. Krebs in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

The women of the Beat movement

Early histories focused on a handful of men, but many women wrote within and alongside the movement. Writers associated with the Beats include Diane di Prima, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Elise Cowen, Lenore Kandel, Bonnie Bremser, ruth weiss, Carolyn Cassady, Edie Parker and, in a later wave, Anne Waldman. Di Prima published her first collection in 1958, co-edited the newsletter The Floating Bear with LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and was arrested by the FBI in 1961 over two poems printed in it.

Several of the best accounts of the period are memoirs by women. Joyce Johnson, who met Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Ginsberg in January 1957, wrote Minor Characters (1983), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik appeared from Olympia Press in 1969. These memoirs are often read as a corrective to the male-centred legend, giving the period’s women the central place that early histories denied them.

Key works

• Go — John Clellon Holmes, 1952. Usually considered the first Beat novel, based on Holmes’s friendships with Kerouac, Ginsberg and Neal Cassady.
• Junkie — William S. Burroughs, 1953. Burroughs’s first book, a plain-spoken account of addiction that preceded his more experimental work.
• Howl and Other Poems — Allen Ginsberg, 1956. The movement’s defining poem, first read at the Six Gallery and the subject of the 1957 obscenity trial.
• On the Road — Jack Kerouac, 1957. The novel that made the Beats famous, drafted on a single scroll in 1951.
• The Dharma Bums — Jack Kerouac, 1958. Fictionalises the Six Gallery reading and the friendship with Gary Snyder, the model for Japhy Ryder.
• A Coney Island of the Mind — Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1958. One of the best-selling poetry books ever published, with around a million copies in print.
• Naked Lunch — William S. Burroughs, 1959. First published by Olympia Press in France; its 1960s obscenity case in Massachusetts ended in the book’s favour in 1966.
• Memoirs of a Beatnik — Diane di Prima, 1969. A provocative first-person account of Beat-era New York from one of the movement’s leading women poets.
• Minor Characters — Joyce Johnson, 1983. An award-winning memoir of the Beat years told from the perspective of the women around the men.

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