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beat generation

Anticipating the counterculture of the 1960s, the beat generation rejected the life of the “organization man” and suburban culture. A generation weary of conventions, beat artists undertook a mystical search for salvation in poetry, jazz, sex and meditation. For them, suburban lifestyle restricted freedom and creativity as did women and settling into marriage. Instead, beat artists strove to be down and out; vagrancy and mobility (often in a car, a symbol of suburban culture) were virtues. Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “Howl” (1955) assailed the nation and its values, making heroes of drop-outs and drug users who had rejected families and jobs and taken time off from good behavior. The beats’ bible, though, was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), which describes Kerouac’s four trips across America in the company of his friends, Neal Cassidy (perhaps the true moving spirit behind the beats), Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. By the 1960s the term “beatnik” was widely used for anyone who took on the beat style, without the substance.

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