The end of World War two brought upon conformity and a conservative mindset. The majority of young people's priorities were to marry, move to suburbs, and be financially successful. However, there was a young group of men who were strongly against the "American dream" that the rest of society was working for. These men were Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassidy. They were a group of "struggling writers, students, hustlers, and drug addicts" (Wikipedia.com) better known as the "beats", and the founding fathers of the beat generation.
Jack Kerouac is often seen as the leading pioneer of the beats. Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. Lowell was a small town, and "out of the raw outline of the legend he made out of his life in Lowell is simple and uncomplicated" (Charters 23). Kerouac had wild and vivid fantasies of making his life a legend. "He was always adapting roles, always an outsider, a spectator peering into the window like a shadow" (Charters 29). Life in Lowell would be no material for a legend, but life in New York would be. It was in New York that Kerouac was introduced to William S. Burroughs. He would become the biggest influence on Jack's life at the time. Burroughs was a writer as well, but never considered himself one. He had interest in experimenting with criminal behavior, and often had contacts in the criminal "underground". However, His confidence and style awed Kerouac. Kerouac would leave New York and later return in October of 1944. Through a mutual friend, he would encounter a "spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out" (Charters 53) this kid would be Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs friendship only became stronger of the years. The three often spent most their time together, often engaging in drug use, collaborating on literature, and drinking. They and a few others would develop a huge interest in lifestyle experimentation: religion, sexuality, drugs, questioning authority, changing artistically and intellectually. Kerouac and his fellow struggling writers often thought of themselves as "romantic geniuses." Kerouac would explain to his parents who often saw his lifestyle as a waste, that he was creating plot for his novel. To Kerouac, everything around him, his friends, his family, and his mind were contributing factors in his novels. Personal relationships would be Jack's base for his art. Ginsberg recalls that he felt that "Kerouac's books were the expression of the theme of "mortal souls wandering earth in time that is vanishing under our feet" (Charters 65). In following years, Kerouac would meet Neal Cassidy. Cassidy's rambunctious behavior and nutty lifestyle intrigued Jack so much that Neal would become the center of Kerouac's most infamous novel On the Road. In reality Cassidy would become the most dominant influence in his life as well. Jack's search for spiritual liberation would give birth to his novel On the Road. His writing exposed his, and his friends desire to find self fulfillment, and portrayed their rejection of societies mold. On the Road became so successful because it gave voice to the rising, disenchanted young generation of the late forties and mid fifties. It would depict the disinterest in "living a life that Harvard designs for you".
These young authors would come to represent the beat generation. Kerouac coined the term the "beat generation" in 1948 to John C. Holmes as a description of his social circle. "Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs were new bohemian libertines who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity. Their literature was controversial in its advocacy of non-conformity and non-conforming style" (Wikipedia.com). Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and William Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" are two important beat writings, and became a focus in American society because of the controversy they brought at the time. The influence of the less creative members of the beat generation would be Neal Cassidy, and guys like Hal Chase, and Herbert Huncke. They may not have been known for their writing, but "provided subject material for writers." Kerouac notes that Cassidy was his key influence in his spontaneous prose style/technique that he used in On the Road. The beat generation also recognizes Jazz as an important influence on its writers. "What the Beats understood and identified with in jazz, was protest against the white middle-class world" (McNally 144).
The beat generation was the first generation to cause a rift in the culture of society, unlike the twenties it did not become a "lost generation." During a time after a devastating war, all America knew how to do was pretend like nothing happened. Society feared the change and insight the war had given people and insisted women return to the household obediently, marriages stay together, and people live in suburban bliss. But the beats discarded the values of this phony American lifestyle. These young men had seen a war, and life was too short. They could not find self fulfillment and a meaning in life in those values. Their denunciation for the conformity is what made the beat generation the first "subculture." The 1960's counterculture was easily originated from the literature and lifestyles from the beat generation. Two leading men in the sixties counterculture, writers Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson were inspired by Jack Kerouac's methods for writing, and his character alone. Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's lyrical stream of consciousness can also be credited towards Kerouac's spontaneous prose method and his close friendship with Allen Ginsberg. The voices of the beat generation helped for an even larger social upheaval in the sixties, because the young generation influenced by the words of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs had learned the easier way out of the grasp of conventionality: the road.
Sources
Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A biography. Straight Arrow Books. New York. 1973
Gifford, Barry. Lee, Lawerence. Jacks Book.St Martins Press. New York.1978
Kauffman, Bill.The Beats Go On. American Enterprise; Nov/Dec97. Vol 8 Issue 6.pg77
McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel, Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America. Random House Inc.New York.1979