Literature The Beat Generation and Hippies Herbert Huncke, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Jack Kerouac met in 1944 for the first time on the campus of the Columbia University campus in New York. They formed the beginning of the Beat Generation: a group of young anti-conformist authors. In 1948 a writers group started calling themselves the Beat Generation. Later they moved to San Francisco where other members joined. The best known writers of the group nowadays are Herbert Huncke, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Jack Kerouac. The word ‘beat’ means tired or beaten down. But Kerouac changed its meaning to something positive: ‘on the beat’, ‘upbeat’ and ‘beatific’. This is where the name of the Beat Generation comes from. In the beginning of 50’s the group was anti-political but this changed very fast. After this they were mostly writing about sexual liberation, experimenting with drugs, personal instinctive experiments, spiritual journeys and the rejection of standard writing styles. They were seen as creative, experimenting, lighthearted non-conformist people. In San Francisco the group became friends with poets asociated with the San Francisco Renaissance, a poetry group that wrote all kinds of poetry. Later on in the 1960’s the Beat Genaration incorporated into the bigger counterculture movements and the hippies. Because of the baby boom there were a lot of young people wanting to change the world: “Make love not War”. This was the most famous slogan in the protest against the Vietnam war, which was also one of the subjects of the writers in the 60’s. Writers like Allen Ginsberg wrote poems against war. The Beat Genaration wrote openly about sex and about their personal experience with homosexuality for the first time. This was really a revolution for that time. They fought for the civil rights of gays, women, African-Americans and other minorities. The members were also trying all different kinds of drugs out of curiosity to see what it would do with your mind. (A lot of times they would end up as a drug addict though.) Some of the writers like Ginsberg were also inspired by the Romantic period and they sometimes wrote in a romantic style. And other writers like were still writing in a surrealistic style, like Ted Jones, a Jazz poet. There were also writers like William Carlos Williams who wanted the direct American style in literature instead of imitating the poetic style of the European new classisistic writers. |