The Beat Generation is a label applied to a non-conformist social movement begun in New York City in the 1950s. Its message was carried by a group of writers who used stream-of-consciousness forms to express the insights and longings of those who rejected the mainstream values of the times. Although the Beat writers produced few lasting works, their attitudes inspired rock music artists and social movements of the 1960s and beyond.
The term beat was coined in 1964 by Herbert Huncke. He meant it to be a synonym for tied or down and out. In 1948, the word was used by Jack Kerouac in his phrase Beat Generation, by which he changed the reference to mean upbeat and beatific. The phrase finally entered public consciousness in 1952 with John Clellon Holmes’s article in the New York Times Magazine called “This is the Beat Generation.”
The original Beats were a group of friends from New York City who met in the mid-1940s. They included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. That core group moved to San Francisco, where they were joined by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and many others.
The first famous work of Beat literature was the long poem, Howl, by Allen Ginsberg. In 1955, Ginsberg read the poem aloud at a gallery in San Francisco, causing a stir with its portrayal of drug use and homosexuality. Its fame was fueled by the obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who sold the poem in his bookstore. But Ferlinghetti was acquitted when the judge ruled that the work did have “redeeming social importance” and thus was not obscene.
The most successful Beat novelist was Jack Kerouac. In his best novel, On the Road, published in 1957, Kerouac described an automobile trip around the United States by a character based on himself, Sal Paradise, and Dean Moriarty, based on Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady. The novel made Cassady into a cultural icon known for his irresponsible lifestyle, womanizing, amorality, and lust for life.
On the Road became known as much for how Kerouac wrote it as for its content. Kerouac allegedly was high on pills while he wrote it, and he typed it on a continuous scroll of paper so that he would not have to interrupt his thoughts by changing paper. He is said to have believed that “the first thought is the best thought”, and he claimed that he never revised what he wrote. Though he said that he wrote the book in just three weeks, the truth is that he had been planning the novel for years and that he wrote several drafts.
Also influential was a novel by William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, which also survived an obscenity trial. In that work, Burroughs, who was a drug addict himself, tells of his drug-induced fantasies and his travels among addicts and criminals.
In the 1960s, those who followed Beat philosophy became known as hippies or yippies. Their culture was centered in San Francisco, which became a center of rock music, drug culture, and protest against the war in Vietnam.
The Beat Generation’s lasting contribution to literature is that it encouraged writing on more personal topics, including those showing the unpleasant sides of human nature and of society. It validated expression through informal, conversational language and made profanity a permissible tool for revealing human feelings.
26. The word coined in the passage is closest in meaning to ________.
27. Why does the author mention the New York Times Magazine in the passage?
28. According to the passage, which of the following is true of On the Road?
29. The word interrupt in the passage is closest in meaning to ________.
30. According to the passage, Beat literature can best be described as ________.
