Beat Generation: fundamental elements and main representatives of the movement

Questo appunto di Letteratura Inglese riguarda la Beat Generation, un movimento giovanile nato negli anni Cinquanta da un gruppo di scrittori americani e protrattosi fino agli anni Settanta. A seguire si descriveranno gli elementi fondamentali del movimento e si presenterà uno dei suoi esponenti principali: lo scrittore Jack Kerouac.

The Beat Generation: overview

The Beat Generation can be described as an artistic movement which started in the Fifties and lasted up to the Seventies. The word “beat” was first used by Jack Kerouac and means “poor”, “outcast”; it is also connected with the beat of jazz, a kind of music that was considered as a form of improvisation and expression of inner freedom. There is also a connection to the word “beatitude”, because many of these artists turned to Oriental religions (such as Buddhism) in order to find a high level of spirituality among the materialism and the social instability that characterized the post-war years. The members of the Beat Generation rebelled against every form of authority and wanted freedom in every aspect of their life. They wore new clothes (such as large pants, and floral shirts) and new haircuts (especially long hair), listened to new music (in particular Rock), and started the tradition of music festivals. However, the presence of too much freedom and the lack of a solid reference point made some of them turn to the abuse of alcohol and drugs.

The Beat Generation: when, where and how the group was formed

The group was officially formed in the Fifties in New York. In particular, it is widely believed that the Beat Generation began at Columbia University, when Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carr and others met. Although these authors are known as anti-academics, many of their ideas originated in response to professors such as Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. Carr and Ginsberg saw the need to identify a "new vision" and conceived a rupture ideal, in contrast to their professors' idealistic and literary tradition. Subsequently, the group moved to San Francisco, where the members met at the famous City Lights Bookstore.

What are the main themes and elements of the Beat Generation?

The central elements of “Beat” culture are: the rejection of imposed norms, innovations in style, experimentation with drugs, an interest in Eastern religions, a rejection of materialism and explicit and crude depictions of the human condition. Its most important representatives are Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady, Bob Kaufman, Lew Welch, Charles Bukowski (who, however, rejected the Beat label), Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, John Giorno and Norman Mailer. The authors of the Beat generation took up the themes of the youth protest of their era, which, starting from a radical critique of the Vietnam War, extended to the entire American system, questioning the racial segregation of black people, the subordinate condition of women and discrimination based on sexual orientation. They wrote about mental journeys - including through psychedelic experimentation with drugs such as LSD - and physical journeys, far and wide across the roads of the USA. For example, Kerouac's "On the Road" was written while hitchhiking from one coast of the United States to the other.

The Beat Generation: Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac is considered to be one of the greatest and most important American writers of the 20th century, as well as the “father of the beat movement”; in his writings, he expressed the main ideas that characterized the Beat Generation. His style, called "spontaneous prose" by Kerouac himself, inspired several artists and writers of the Beat Generation, as well as musicians such as the American singer and songwriter Bob Dylan. His best-known works are "On the Road", which is considered as the manifesto of the Beat Generation, "The Subterraneans", "The Dharma Bums" and "Big Sur". These works are about his travels across the United States of America and brief stays in a few locations. Kerouac spent most of his life divided between the great spaces of North and Central America and his mother's flat in Lowell, a small industrial town and a textile centre on the Merrimack River in Massachusetts. His writings reflect a desire to break free from the stifling social conventions of the time and give meaning to his existence. In his travels, Kerouac seemed to be in search of a place that would give him inner stability and fill a depressing feeling of emptiness, symbolised by the death of his older brother, Gerard, at the age of four and then of his father, Leo, twenty years later. He was also searching for an answer to the mystery of life; in his opinion, facing the enigmatic nature of existence was the only important activity in this world. Kerouac exalted the benefits of love (for him, carnal passion was a gateway to Paradise) and proclaimed the futility of militarism, but in 1966 he declared himself in favour of US intervention in Vietnam. Kerouac and his writings are considered forerunners of the lifestyle of the youth of the 1960s and the hippy movement, which inspired the pacifist, anti-militarist anti-Vietnam War and libertarian movements of May 1968.
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