Legacy, History & Reception of The Beat Generation

The Beat Generation came to prominence in the public eye during the 1950s, representing a used, and worn out offspring, the evidence of repression and the choices of America’s leaders leading up to the Great Depression and into World War II seen in the character of the young adults who survived these major historical events since youth. It was Jack Kerouac who coined the term, the label for those like him who did not accept their leaders, the social stigmas of the time, and did not accept the dependency on consumerism that was so emphasized during the time period. Before Kerouac’s conversation with John Clellon Holmes where he first referenced the term “beat generation,” he gives an account of talking to some hipsters in Times Sqaure, who ended up inspiring him to remember the term: “One of them, Huncke of Chicago, came up to me and said, ‘Man, I’m beat.’ I knew right away what he meant somehow.... And so when Huncke...said ‘I’m beat’ with radiant light shining out of his despairing eyes...it was a new language...[and] couldn’t be a more economical term to mean so many things” (Tamony 275).
With works like Kerouac’s On the Road, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the Beat generation poets were launched, and their anti-materialistic values and preachings surely dictated and persuaded the cultural movement of the Sixties and Seventies, for when the Beats first emerged in the mid-Fifties, the culture still offered some resistance to the controversial values the Beats advocated, but this soon lead to the countercultures of the Sixties. With a change in terminology from “beat” to “hippie,” also came a split in the stances held by the Beat poets. While Jack Kerouac criticized the multiple protest movements (“an excuse for spitefulness”), Allen Ginsberg became directly involved with anti-war protests and became an activist himself, channeling his inspiration through poetry. Reflecting on the Sixties’ counterculture twenty years later, Ginsberg believed that what remained as a legacy from the period was “a permanent change in awareness; remember, the notion of Armageddon apocalypse before the Sixties was considered eccentric, whereas now as a possibility it’s a universal awareness.... I think there was a glimpse of possibility of survival of the planet, partly through spirit, partly through imagination and poetry, partly through psychedelic insight” (Ginsberg 463).
By the time the Sixties and the Seventies’ hippie movement, survivors of the poets, like Allen Ginsberg (Kerouac died of alcohol poisoning in 1969), still continued their literary work, but as for what the Beat Generation caused and represented, I believe was fate; a rejection which led to movements and near-revolution, and an essential part of the Fifties and Sixties with their new approach to literature and understanding human thought. They emphasized free expression, a unfortunately controversial stance, that inspired their affluence for non-comformity.



Ginsberg, Allen. Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-96. New York: Perennial, 2002. Print.

Tamony, Peter. "Beat Generation: Beat: Beatniks." Western Folklore 28.4 (1969): 274-277. Web. 16 Oct 2009.