"Merry Pranksters, a group of which Neal Cassady was a member, which also included members of the Grateful Dead. In the 1970s, Burroughs was a friend of Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Patti Smith. The musical group Steely Dan is named after a steam-powered dildo in Burroughs' ""Naked Lunch"". British progressive rock band Soft Machine is named after Burroughs' novel ""The Soft Machine"". Singer-songwriter Tom Waits, a Beat fan, wrote ""Jack and Neal"" about Kerouac and Cassady, and recorded ""On the Road"" (a song written by Kerouac after finishing the novel) with Primus. He later collaborated with Burroughs"
"John Clellon Holmes John Clellon Holmes (March 12, 1926, Holyoke, Massachusetts – March 30, 1988, Middletown, Connecticut) was an American author, poet and professor, best known for his 1952 novel ""Go"". Considered the first ""Beat"" novel, ""Go"" depicted events in his life with his friends Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. He was often referred to as the ""quiet Beat"" and was one of Kerouac's closest friends. Holmes also wrote what is considered the definitive jazz novel of the Beat Generation, ""The Horn"". Holmes was more an observer and documenter of beat characters like Ginsberg, Cassady and Kerouac than"
"term ""Beat"" referred, all at the same time, to the countercultural rhythm of the Jazz scene, to a sense of rebellion regarding the conservative stress of post-war society, and to an interest in new forms of spiritual experience through drugs, alcohol, philosophy, and religion, and specifically through Zen Buddhism. Allen Ginsberg set the tone of the movement in his poem ""Howl"", a Whitmanesque work that began: ""I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..."" Among the most representative achievements of the Beats in the novel are Jack Kerouac's ""On the Road"" (1957), the chronicle of a soul-searching"
"of the cast of characters, almost as a mantra. In Britain ""Go"" was originally published as ""The Beat Boys"". The characters in ""Go"" are, as was common in beat generation literature, representations of the real people the author knew while writing the book. Go (Holmes novel) Go is a semi-autobiographical novel by John Clellon Holmes. (Holmes referred to the book as a ""roman à clef"".) It is considered to be the first published novel depicting the beat generation. Set in New York, it concerns the lives of a collection of characters largely based on the friends Holmes used to hang"
"Go (Holmes novel) Go is a semi-autobiographical novel by John Clellon Holmes. (Holmes referred to the book as a ""roman à clef"".) It is considered to be the first published novel depicting the beat generation. Set in New York, it concerns the lives of a collection of characters largely based on the friends Holmes used to hang around with in the 1940s and 1950s in Manhattan. An underworld of drug-fueled parties, bars, clubs and free love is explored through the eyes of character Paul Hobbes, Holmes' representation of himself in the novel. Hobbes is torn between joining his friends in"
"journal conducted in the interests of the higher life of the household"". The magazine was subsequently published in Springfield after March 1887, and moved to New York following its acquisition in 1911 by the Hearst Corporation. In literature, Holyoke was the hometown of John Clellon Holmes, whose novel Go is considered to be the first published novel depicting the Beat Generation, predating works of his contemporaries Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Though not as well known as Holmes, the critically acclaimed novelist Raymond Kennedy set a number of his works in a fictional Holyoke, referred to as ""Ireland Parish"". Internationally"
"that came to full flower during the hippie years of the 1960s. A short fictional account of this event forms the second chapter of Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel ""The Dharma Bums"". In the account, he describes Allen Ginsberg's famous reading of his poem ""Howl"". Kerouac and Ginsberg had attended the reading with some of their poet friends. The Bay Area-based philosopher and writer Alan Watts, in his autobiography, mentioned that by around 1960 or so “… something else was on the way, in religion, in music, in ethics and sexuality, in our attitudes to nature, and in our whole style"
"The term later became part of common parlance when Holmes published an article in ""The New York Times Magazine"" entitled ""This Is the Beat Generation"" on November 16, 1952 (pg.10). In the article, Holmes attributes the term to Kerouac, who had acquired the idea from Herbert Huncke. Holmes came to the conclusion that the values and ambitions of the Beat Generation were symbolic of something bigger, which was the inspiration for ""Go"". Later in life, Holmes taught at the University of Arkansas, lectured at Yale and gave workshops at Brown University. He died of cancer in 1988. John Clellon Holmes"
"Beatnik Beatnik was a media stereotype prevalent throughout the 1950s to mid-1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s. Elements of the beatnik trope included pseudo-intellectualism, drug use, and a cartoonish depiction of real-life people along with the spiritual quest of Jack Kerouac's autobiographical fiction. In 1948, Kerouac introduced the phrase ""Beat Generation"", generalizing from his social circle to characterize the underground, anticonformist youth gathering in New York at that time. The name came up in conversation with John Clellon Holmes, who published an early Beat Generation novel titled ""Go"" (1952), along"
"Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Ginsberg is best known for his poem ""Howl"", in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. In 1956, ""Howl"" was seized by San Francisco police and US Customs. In 1957, it attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it described heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state. ""Howl"" reflected Ginsberg's own homosexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner."
"are among the best known examples of Beat literature. Both ""Howl"" and ""Naked Lunch"" were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States. The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. The core group of Beat Generation authors – Herbert Huncke, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Kerouac – met in 1944 in and around the Columbia University campus in New York City. Later, in the mid-1950s, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs and Carr) ended up together in San Francisco"
"the most important events in Beat mythos, known simply as ""The Six Gallery reading"" took place on October 7, 1955. The event, in essence, brought together the East and West Coast factions of the Beat Generation. Of more personal significance to Ginsberg, the reading that night included the first public presentation of ""Howl"", a poem that brought worldwide fame to Ginsberg and to many of the poets associated with him. An account of that night can be found in Kerouac's novel ""The Dharma Bums"", describing how change was collected from audience members to buy jugs of wine, and Ginsberg reading"
"with the manifesto ""This Is the Beat Generation"" in ""The New York Times Magazine"". In 1954, Nolan Miller published his third novel ""Why I Am So Beat"" (Putnam), detailing the weekend parties of four students. The adjective ""beat"" was introduced to the group by Herbert Huncke, though Kerouac expanded the meaning of the term. ""Beat"" came from underworld slang—the world of hustlers, drug addicts and petty thieves, where Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac sought inspiration. ""Beat"" was slang for ""beaten down"" or downtrodden, but to Kerouac and Ginsberg, it also had a spiritual connotation as in ""beatitude."" Other adjectives discussed by"
"literature, with the institutionally established modernist tradition, and most writers feeling compelled to self-censor themselves. This would clash with the ""Beat fiction"" which pushed the boundaries of what was considered allowed, causing a liberating and exciting cultural effect which encouraged other writers to free up. For this, the ""Beat movement was met with a series of censorships and law enforcement excesses. Beatniks and the Beat Generation, an anti-materialistic literary movement whose name was invented by Jack Kerouac in 1948 and stretched on into the early-mid-1960s, was at its zenith in the 1950s. Such groundbreaking literature from the beats includes William"
"For its critique of mainstream American culture, the poem is considered to be one of the major works of the Beat Generation, which included other authors of the era such as Jack Kerouac, William Seward Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ginsberg achieved critical success in 1956 with the publication of ""Howl and Other Poems"", with ""Howl"" being the most popular of the works in the collection. Like ""Howl"", ""A Supermarket in California"" was a critique of postwar America, yet in the poem the narrator focuses more on consumerist aspects of society by contrasting his generation with Whitman's. ""A Supermarket in California"""
"Howl ""Howl"", also known as ""Howl for Carl Solomon"", is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection ""Howl and Other Poems"". The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon. Ginsberg began work on ""Howl"" in 1954. In the Paul Blackburn Tape Archive at the University of California, San Diego, Ginsberg can be heard reading early drafts of his poem to his fellow writing associates. ""Howl"" is considered to be one of the great works of American literature. It came to be associated with the group of writers known as the Beat Generation. It is"
"ceremonies, in a sense to bridge generations. Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Ginsberg and Gary Snyder read on October 7, 1955, before 100 people (including Kerouac, up from Mexico City). Lamantia read poems of his late friend John Hoffman. At his first public reading Ginsberg performed the just finished first part of ""Howl"". It was a success and the evening led to many more readings by the now locally famous Six Gallery poets. It was also a marker of the beginning of the Beat movement, since the 1956 publication of ""Howl"" (""City Lights Pocket Poets"", no. 4) and its"
"this reading that Allen Ginsberg first presented his poem ""Howl"". Hedrick, a painter and veteran of the Korean War, approached Ginsberg in the summer of 1955 and asked him to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery. At first, Ginsberg refused. But once he’d written a rough draft of ""Howl"", he changed his “fucking mind,” as he put it. The large and excited audience included a drunken Jack Kerouac, who refused to read his own work but cheered the other poets on, shouting ""Yeah! Go! Go!"" during their performances. Still, Kerouac was able to recall much of what occurred"
"books, including ""Minor Characters"" and ""Come and Join the Dance"", which expressed the two women's experiences in the Barnard and Columbia Beat community. Through his association with Elise Cowen, Ginsberg discovered that they shared a mutual friend, Carl Solomon, to whom he later dedicated his most famous poem ""Howl"". This poem is considered an autobiography of Ginsberg up to 1955, and a brief history of the Beat Generation through its references to his relationship to other Beat artists of that time. In 1948 in an apartment in Harlem, Ginsberg had an auditory hallucination while reading the poetry of William Blake"
"entire life to poetry. Soon after, he wrote ""Howl"", the poem that brought him and his Beat Generation contemporaries to national attention and allowed him to live as a professional poet for the rest of his life. Later in life, Ginsberg entered academia, teaching poetry as Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College from 1986 until his death. Ginsberg claimed throughout his life that his biggest inspiration was Kerouac's concept of ""spontaneous prose"". He believed literature should come from the soul without conscious restrictions. Ginsberg was much more prone to revise than Kerouac. For example, when Kerouac saw the first"
"S. Burroughs' ""Naked Lunch"", Allen Ginsberg's ""Howl"", and Jack Kerouac's ""On the Road"". This decade is also marked by some of the most famous works of science fiction by science fiction writers Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, and Robert A. Heinlein. Other significant literary works of the decade included: Though it was not published until 1960, John Updike's ""Rabbit, Run"" was written during and exemplifies the culture of the 1950s. The novel ""Revolutionary Road"" by Richard Yates, published in 1961, is concerned with mid-1950s life and culture. Sylvia Plath's ""The Bell Jar"","
"a shoe at Corso, and both he and Ginsberg left before Ginsberg could read ""Howl."" Corso returned to New York in 1958, amazed that he and his compatriots had become famous, or notorious, emerging literary figures. In late 1958, Corso reunited with Ginsberg and Orlovsky. They were astonished that before they left for Europe they had sparked a social movement, which San Francisco columnist Herb Caen called ""Beat-nik,"" combining ""beat"" with the Russian ""Sputnik,"" as if to suggest that the Beat writers were both ""out there"" and vaguely Communist. San Francisco's obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing Ginsberg's ""Howl"""
"an anti-intellectualism so bitter that it makes the ordinary American's hatred of eggheads seem positively benign"". Howl and Other Poems Howl and Other Poems is a collection of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published November 1, 1956. It contains Ginsberg's most famous poem, ""Howl"", which is considered to be one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as ""A Supermarket in California"", ""Transcription of Organ Music"", ""Sunflower Sutra"", ""America"", ""In the Baggage Room at Greyhound"", and some of his earlier works. For printing the collection, the publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another well-known poet, was arrested and charged with obscenity."
"Howl and Other Poems Howl and Other Poems is a collection of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published November 1, 1956. It contains Ginsberg's most famous poem, ""Howl"", which is considered to be one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as ""A Supermarket in California"", ""Transcription of Organ Music"", ""Sunflower Sutra"", ""America"", ""In the Baggage Room at Greyhound"", and some of his earlier works. For printing the collection, the publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another well-known poet, was arrested and charged with obscenity. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn found Ferlinghetti not guilty of the obscenity charge,"
"The Beat: Go-Go's Fusion of Funk and Hip-Hop The Beat: Go-Go's Fusion of Funk and Hip-Hop is a 2001 book written by Kip Lornell and Charles C. Stephenson, Jr. In 2009, an updated second edition of the book was published and retitled The Beat! Go-Go Music from Washington, D.C. ""The Beat"" explores the musical, social, and cultural phenonmenon of go-go music (a music genre is rooted in funk, soul and old-school hip hop) the only musical from indigenous to Washington, D.C., which features highly syncopated, nonstop beats. Charles Stephenson (a political and cultural activist, and former manager of Experience Unlimited)"
"Jack Kerouac Jack Kerouac (; born Jean-Louis Kérouac (though he called himself Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac); March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist and poet of French-Canadian descent. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. He became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its"
"manager who was jailed for selling ""Howl,"" became lifelong friends. Ginsberg claimed at one point that all of his work was an extended biography (like Kerouac's ""Duluoz Legend""). ""Howl"" is not only a biography of Ginsberg's experiences before 1955, but also a history of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg also later claimed that at the core of ""Howl"" were his unresolved emotions about his schizophrenic mother. Though ""Kaddish"" deals more explicitly with his mother, ""Howl"" in many ways is driven by the same emotions. ""Howl"" chronicles the development of many important friendships throughout Ginsberg's life. He begins the poem with ""I"
"1955, before 100 people (including Kerouac, up from Mexico City). Lamantia read poems of his late friend John Hoffman. At his first public reading Ginsberg performed the just-finished first part of ""Howl."" Gregory Corso arrived late the next day, missing the historic reading, at which he had been scheduled to read. The Six Gallery was a success, and the evening led to many more readings by the now locally famous Six Gallery poets. It was also a marker of the beginning of the West Coast Beat movement, since the 1956 publication of ""Howl"" (City Lights Pocket Poets, no. 4) and"
"Bill Cannastra William ""Bill"" Cannastra (1922–1950) was a member of the early Beat Generation scene in New York. He was a ""wild man"" figure that the writers in the group found interesting, similar to their fascination with Neal Cassady. Characters based on Bill Cannastra were included in both the John Clellon Holmes novel ""Go"" (as ""Agatson"") and Jack Kerouac's ""Visions of Cody"" (as ""Finistra""). He is also described in Allen Ginsberg's ""Howl"". William Cannastra was one of two sons born to a wealthy, aristocratic mother and a machinist father who had emigrated from Italy. ""The Cannastras lived on Schenectady's Pennsylvania"
"Beat Generation and Beat have been used to describe the antimaterialistic literary movement that began with Kerouac in the 1940s and continued into the 1960s. The Beat philosophy of antimaterialism and soul searching influenced 1960s musicians such as Bob Dylan, the early Pink Floyd and The Beatles. However, the soundtrack of the beat movement was the modern jazz pioneered by saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, which the media dubbed bebop. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg spent much of their time in New York jazz clubs such as the Royal Roost, Minton's Playhouse, Birdland and the Open Door, shooting"
"movement. Among the emerging novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, a few were closely connected with Beat writers, most notably Ken Kesey (""One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest""). Though they had no direct connection, other writers considered the Beats to be a major influence, including Thomas Pynchon (""Gravity's Rainbow"") and Tom Robbins (""Even Cowgirls Get the Blues""). William S. Burroughs is considered a forefather of postmodern literature; he also inspired the cyberpunk genre. One-time Beat writer LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka helped initiate the Black Arts movement. As there was focus on live performance among the Beats, many Slam poets have claimed"
"to report on the Beat poetry scene. Eberhart wrote a piece published in the September 2, 1956, ""New York Times Book Review"" entitled ""West Coast Rhythms"" that helped call national attention to the Beat generation, and especially to Allen Ginsberg as the author of ""Howl"", which he called ""the most remarkable poem of the young group."" Ginsberg credited Eberhart's article with ""breaking the ice"" for the Beats in regard to getting them published. President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Eberhart a member of the Advisory Committee on the Arts for the National Cultural Centre in 1959. As well, Eberhart was Poet Laureate"
"Beat (2000 film) Beat is a 2000 American drama film written and directed by Gary Walkow, concerning the period of writer William S. Burroughs's life that he spent with his wife, Joan Vollmer, leading up to her accidental killing in 1951. The film stars Kiefer Sutherland as Burroughs, Courtney Love as Joan, Norman Reedus as Lucien Carr, and Ron Livingston as Allen Ginsberg. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2000 and was entered into the 22nd Moscow International Film Festival. The film opens with Vollmer balancing a water tumbler on her head as Burroughs, her husband, aims"