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The Beat Generation

The Beat Generation was a group of American writers who established a countercultural literary movement in the 1950s. The key figures of the Beat Generation were virtually all male, and included, principally, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. These three met in New York in the mid-1940s, when Ginsberg and Kerouac were undergraduates at Columbia University. Most of them reconvened a decade later in San Francisco, where on Kerouac’s suggestion they adopted the name “Beats”—meaning at once beaten down and beatified. 

What united the Beats was a shared rejection of mainstream social, moral, and economic values. As such, much of their work energetically rebutted postwar America’s self-image as a bastion of liberty and a guarantor of “the good life.” Instead, these writers explored alternative avenues for living a meaningful life, including spiritual quests, hallucinogenic drugs, and sexual liberation. Perhaps the best-known work of the Beats is Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road (1957). Other influential works included Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” (1956) and William S. Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch—both of which were subjected to obscenity trials that ultimately failed. Though relatively short lived, the influence of the Beats continued to be felt in the countercultural movement that flourished in the 1960s.

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