The Beat Generation

 

From Left to Right - Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs

The Beat Generation – what is that?  The Beat Generation was not a generation at all.  Nor was it a movement in the general sense of the term.  It was more like a flock of like-minded individuals who felt essentially bonded to each other.  They shared a uniquely different and wildly unconventional view of life, more or less, and were usually in agreement about most things, more or less.

The Beat Generation had its origins in 1940’s America and evolved in two major population centers – New York City, New York and San Francisco, California, on the East and West coasts, respectively.  Why these two particular locations?  In my thinking this was due to the fact that both urban centers had a wildly heterogeneous mix of individuals that came from many countries with dramatically different cultural and ethnic roots.  As a result, they were places where the society at large was open to difference, diversity, and behavioral variations.

Greenwich Village in New York City and the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco became the havens for the unconventional, the writers, the artists, those who were made pariahs on account of their differing attitudes, their natural proclivities, their true selves.  They were disillusioned by the cultural norms that they felt were stifling and constricting.  They were the lovers of true freedom, or what they considered to be true freedom.  They felt oppressed by the ridged sexual codes and attitudes of the time.  They sought more from life.  They were hungry for life.  They questioned conventional values.  They made those around them feel uncomfortable; that was not their intention; that was not their goal.  Life called to them; they wanted to enroll in it and give it their all.  They were intrigued by the state and nature of human consciousness – that particular quality that makes us all human.  Many of their cohorts were intrigued by Buddhism and captivated by its underlying principle of being.

I was born in 1944 near the end of that most horrific epoch in human history, World War II, that spanned the years of 1939 to 1945.  The global impact of this war was so horrific that the carnage that resulted from it defies description.  It is estimated that 75 million human beings were annihilated before it came to its conclusion.  This war also had a profound psychological impact upon humanity and the human condition.

The United States mainland was not attacked during this war, and, as a result, its infrastructure was untouched – this gave the country a substantial economic advantage in that its industrial base remained intact.  This was a time of accelerated material advantage that gave rise to many new products spawned by both ingenuity and invention.  This surge in economic activity catapulted the nation into an age of growth and prosperity for many.

Thanks to the forward-looking policies of President Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, the artistic communities throughout the country were sustained and supported.  However, the war had a dampening impact upon artistic expression.  Once the war had ended, the newfound prosperity had an invigorating influence on artistic expression in the late 1940s and 1950s and 1960s especially within the urban centers.

I grew up in the Bronx, New York in a classic tenement – the kind that populated much of the city.  In my experience, New York has always possessed a boundless energy fueled by the wondrous diversity of its citizens.  My neighborhood was a reflection of this unrelenting presence of life. 

I was enthralled by the power of words and became enamored of writing as a means to tell my stories and I was attracted to poetry as a vehicle of expression for emotional states of being.  It was during this period of time that I was introduced to the Beat community.  In that era, poetry groups and poetry readings were advertised extensively in the Village Voice and there were many of them.  I had the good fortune to find the New York Poets Cooperative that was under the auspices of a renowned local poet – Barbara Holland.  She was interested in my work and appreciated how I arranged the words on paper.  I became her protégé.  She encouraged me to present my work as a featured reader at the St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery (East Village).  Holland also encouraged me to lead a New York Poets Cooperative group in Brooklyn.  Unfortunately, it did not attract enough poets to succeed.

St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in NYC is a major hub of Beat Generation legacy, home to The Poetry Project (founded 1966) where Allen Ginsberg and other contemporaries read.  The church represents the epicenter of the literary tradition that Ginsberg helped establish He later helped create the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado.

Coincidentally, I was living in Boulder at the time the Naropa Institute was founded (it is now Naropa University), and I had the opportunity to visit it as a guest.  The Naropa Institute was founded in 1974 by the Tibetan llama Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Buddhist teacher and scholar renowned for his book entitled, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.  It was designed to be a place where Buddhist teaching around the study of the mind was integrated with traditional Western liberal arts and artistic disciplines.  It was here that Ginsberg proposed and led a class, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics as mentioned above, that studied Western poetry centered around the beat poetry of his generation that was largely involved in exploring human consciousness.

 

The following are brief biographies of the predominant leaders of the Beat Generation.

Allen Ginsberg played a fundamental and foundational role within the Beat community of artists as a poet and political activist in support of sexual preference at a time when the homosexual community was demonized by the larger society.  His remarkable piece entitled, Howl is a testimonial to his work.

Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 and died in 1997.  Although he was unconventional and provocative for his time, his writings were well received and influential.

Other well-known and important members of the Beat Generation include, of course, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.

 

Jack Kerouac was Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on March 12, 1922.  He became a renowned writer well known for his major work, On the Road (1957).  Other examples of his work include The Dharma Buns (1958) and Big Sur (1962).   In 1974, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was created at Naropa University (formerly the Naropa Institute) in Boulder, Colorado as mentioned earlier.  It was created by Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and others in Kerouac’s honor (he died in 1969).  This school is still very much alive and thriving.

Kerouac traveled extensively and also resided in San Francisco.  City Lights Booksellers founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti became the meeting place for Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs and others.  Although Ferlinghetti was also a poet, he did not consider himself a member of the group, yet he generously supported their efforts.  It was at City Lights where Kerouac devoted his energy to writing.  City Lights Booksellers situated in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco is still extant; I had the opportunity to visit it quite recently (2026).

 

William Seward Burroughs II was a writer and visual artist.  Burroughs was born in 1914 in St. Louis Missouri and died in 1997 at the age of 83.

Like Ginsberg and Kerouac, Burroghs is considered to be a primary contributor to the identity and purpose of the Beat Generation.  His work was considered to be experimental in nature.  He is most remembered for his major work entitled, Naked Lunch.

 

Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs were contemporaries who were young men that lived through the great economic depression of 1929 and World War II – both destabilizing events that exposed the underlying weakness and frailty of the American culture.  Their viewpoint was shaped by their shared experiences during those troubling times.

In many ways the spirit embodied in the Beat Generation was soon to be carried into the Hippie movement of the 1960s, centered in the Haight Ashbury section of San Francisco, that also challenged conventional culture and thinking.  This new era was inspired and energized by the experience of the seemingly endless Vietnam War (1955-1975).

 

In conclusion, although these writers have died, they have left a significant legacy as reflected in their words, their thoughts, their ideas.  Their insights and the conclusions they have drawn have persisted and endured the battering of time.  Collectively, these representatives of the Beat Generation have lived through some of the worst manifestations of humanity’s capacity to do harm to itself.  They have not only drawn a riveting attention to this bleak reality but also have shown a way out of the darkness and into the brilliance that love, compassion, reason, and understanding can provide.  They have demonstrated the sheer power of words and have helped lead the way to a more sustainable way of thinking and being.

 

The End