The Beats

by Robert Owers
December 2006

The Beat movement, inspired by junkie-thief Herbert Huncke, began in the late 1940’s in New York when Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs met and became friends while students at Columbia University.  The word ‘Beat’ came about as a description of degeneration and weariness (‘I’m beat’), but at the same time being content to be so.   It was a self-imposed bum lifestyle.  Jean-Francois Duval describes it as a “disenchanted rejection of a conformist lifestyle and material values . . . [with] an essentially positive value.” (Duval, 2002)  The Beat movement was concerned with experiencing life as the ultimate socio-economic minority – the degenerate.

The Beats were authors and poets whose principal desire was total freedom from the mundane, middle-class life.  They openly embraced taboos such as crime, alcoholism, drug use and homosexuality, and were frequently discriminated against for doing so.  Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” was banned from print in the U.S. on charges of obscenity.  According to Mikal Gilmore, “’Howl’ was the first American work of the era that spoke for the outcasts . . . to admit that homosexuality might be anything other than a form of insanity. (George-Warren, 1999)

By 1960, however, the Beat movement had become a trend, and two of its principal characters, Kerouac and Burroughs, refused to be associated with it.   The heavy emphasis on individualism and rebellion had disappeared, to be replaced with just another brand of conformity.

Bibliography

Duval, Jean-Francois (2002). Bukowski and the Beats. Northville, MI: Sun Dog Press.

George-Warren, Holly (Ed.). (1999). Rolling Stone Book of the Beats. New York, NY: Hyperion.