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Beat Generation
The beat generation was a group of American writers active during the 1950s. Their most prominent works are Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), and William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch (1959).
Kerouac introduced the phrase beat generation sometime around 1948 to describe his social circle to the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who published an early novel about the beat generation, titled Go, in 1952, along with a manifesto of sorts in the New York Times Magazine: "This is the beat generation"). The adjective beat (introduced to the group by Herbert Huncke) had the connotations of "tired" or "down and out", but Kerouac added the paradoxical connotations of upbeat, beatific, and the musical association of being "on the beat".
Calling this relatively small group of struggling writers, students, hustlers, and drug addicts a "generation" was to make the claim that they were representative and important—the beginnings of a new trend, analogous to the influential Lost Generation. Whether this claim was accurate when the term was coined might be debated, but as the influence of the Beat writers spread the exaggeration seemed less extreme.
The members of the beat generation were new bohemian libertines, who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity. The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style. Followers of "Beat literature" did not emerge until the late 1950s and early 1960s: Kerouac's On The Road (written in 1952), which heralded the beginning of "Beat" popularity, was not published until 1957.
Echoes of the Beat Generation run throughout all the forms of alternative/counter culture that have existed since then (e.g. "hippies", "punks", etc). The Beat Generation can be seen as the first modern subculture. See the "Influences on Western Culture" section below. Both Howl and Naked Lunch became the focus of obscenity trials in the United States that helped to liberalize what could be legally published.
History
The canonical beat generation authors met in New York: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, (in the 1940s) and later (in 1950) Gregory Corso. In the mid-1950s this group expanded to include figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Harold Norse, Lew Welch, and Kirby Doyle.
Perhaps equally important were the less obviously creative members of the scene, who helped form their intellectual environment and provided the writers with much of their subject material: There was Herbert Huncke, a drug addi
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