Beat and Beat Generation

Beat and Beat Generation. ‘Beat’ was a term first used by the notorious hustler and drug addict Herbert Huncke (1916–96) to describe his own state of anomic drifting and social alienation. ‘Beat’ was quickly picked up by Kerouac as a triple entendre—an epithet that brought together a sense of being ‘beaten’ with the state of being ‘beatific’, as well as suggesting the pulse and ‘beat’ of music. The pioneers of the movement were Ginsberg, whose book Howl (1956) protested that America had seen ‘the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’, and Kerouac, whose On the Road (1957) reinvented a mythic landscape of highways, bars, and male bonding. With other writers such as Gregory Corso (1930– ) and W. Burroughs, the Beats developed an aesthetic based on the spontaneity of jazz, Buddhist mysticism, and the raw urgency of sex.

The group met through their connections with Columbia University. They shared an apartment on 115th Street, New York, where they began to talk of a ‘New Vision’—a reaction against what they saw as the sterile nonconformity of post-war America. When this philosophy began to appear as Beat literature, it met with censorship and outrage. Howl was the subject of an obscenity trial in 1956, but was eventually found by the judge to be ‘a plea for holy living’. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) was also tried for obscenity by a court in Chicago, and although the prosecution won, the novel was subsequently cleared on appeal.

The once rebellious Beats are now a respectable area of academic inquiry, and biographers and Hollywood have confirmed their iconic status.