In the mid to late 1950s, a group of writers emerged who changed the face of
literature forever.  Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, among others,
comprised the core of the group deemed the “Beats.”  They combined their vast life
experiences with inventive writing styles and created works that defined a new generation
-- the “Beat Generation.”
	Jack Kerouac coined the term “Beat Generation” in 1945, but he intended, not to
name the generation, but to unname it.  Society had called the generation many
unfavorable things, and Kerouac said that it was nothing but a “beat generation.”  
	Kerouac, perhaps the most celebrated of the Beats, was born in 1922.  Kerouac was
a terribly creative child.  He invented his own baseball game, read voraciously, and began
to write small novels.  He wrote his first novel when he was eleven years old, and he knew
by age seventeen that he wanted to be a writer.  Kerouac was born in Lowell,
Massachusetts, a largely French Canadian town.  He got along well with all his family
members, but Kerouac, sometimes called Ti Jean, deeply admired and almost idolized his
older brother Gerard, who was a sickly child.  The family had once been very prosperous,
but during Kerouac’s childhood, it began to fall into financial trouble.  Kerouac’s father
even turned to gambling to try to return his family to prosperity. 
When Gerard died of rheumatic fever in 1926, the family’s situation grew even more
desperate.  Ti Jean’s father, having no luck gambling, turned to alcohol instead.  Mrs.
Kerouac was devastated by the loss of her oldest child.  Young Jack often believed that
“[his] mother loved Gerard more than she loved [him],” with when Gerard died, Kerouac
had to bear both his personal loss and that of his parents.  While the death of
his cherished older brother was a tragedy, its has a questionable benefit; it provided
Kerouac with much of the emotional inspiration that is evident in his later writings.  
	Jack Kerouac was a model high school student.  He had a 92 academic average, and
he played varsity football and was on the chess team.  Kerouac was offered a
football scholarship to Columbia University in New York, and he enrolled as a freshman in
1940.  Despite his impressive high school record, however, Kerouac was not
very responsible at Columbia.  He is rumored to have set a record for skipping classes, he
failed chemistry, and he often fought with his football coach, who rarely, if ever, let him
play.  Kerouac dropped out of Columbia his sophomore year, but not without
first meeting Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who would later play large roles in
Kerouac’s life.
	After he quit Columbia, Jack Kerouac joined the navy.  He did not last long,
however, as he was “unable to take discipline."  He was given an honorable
discharge for “indifferent character.”  Kerouac held many employment positions before he
began writing full-time.  He worked as a scullion on ships, a gas station attendant, a
deckhand on ships, a newspaper sportswriter, a railroad brakeman, a script synopsizer for
20th Century Fox, a soda jerk, a railroad yardclerk, a baggagehandler, a cotton picker, an
assistant furniture mover, a sheet metal apprentice, a forest service fire lookout, and a
construction laborer.  Kerouac’s true calling, though, was writing.  
	He completed his first adult novel The Town and the City in 1948, but it was very
badly received by the public.  Kerouac then spent a few years of his life traveling across the
country with Allen Ginsberg, his friend from Columbia, and Neal Cassady.  He discovered
a new, free, simple existence on these trips, and they had great influence upon him.  Also,
the letters Neal Cassady wrote to Kerouac inspired Kerouac to write in a new free form
style.  After he returned to New York from his cross-country
adventures, Kerouac wrote his most famous work On the Road on a single roll of typing
paper without breaks.  Kerouac wrote excitedly to Cassady that he
had written a wonderful novel.  The publishers, however, did not appreciate the beauty of
On the Road, and they initially refused to publish it.  After the failure of On
the Road, Kerouac entered a very depressed and bitter personal period.  He went to
Mexico, fell in love with a prostitute, and existed very unhappily.  His luck changed,
however, in 1955, when Harcourt Brace decided to publish On the Road.  They edited the
manuscript brutally, cutting almost half of the novel, and changing the names of all of the
characters, yet despite these changes, On the Road was a great success for Kerouac.  He
went on to write many more novels, including The Dharma Bums, a story of his fascination
with Buddhism, an autobiographical collection of works called The "Legend of Duluoz,"
which contained a book about his brother Gerard, and The Subterraneans, which was
written in 72 straight hours, with the help of Benzedrine.  Although all of Kerouac’s
novels were inventive and beautiful,  he never wrote another novel as publicly renown as
On the Road.
	During the 1960s, Kerouac did not support the “hippie movement.”  He said “It’s
politics, not art anymore.”  He did not want to be an icon of the “Beat” generation, which
he unwittingly named.  Kerouac had become embittered by his failure to produce another
commercially successful novel, and he began to drink heavily.  He died of complications
from alcoholism in 1969.  Kerouac was only 47 when he died, but he left behind a legacy of
literature that will not easily be forgotten.  

	Allen Ginsberg was another legendary “Beat” figure.  He was born in 1926 and
grew up in Paterson, New Jersey.  His parents were Louis Ginsberg, who was a teacher
and had had poetry published, and Naomi Ginsberg.  Naomi was a very radical and
politically minded Communist and a nudist.  She “went insane” in the early years of her
adulthood.  While Allen Ginsberg was growing up, his mother grew very endeared
to him, and she often confided in him when she was paranoid that the rest of the family
was conspiring against her.  Allen adored his mother, and he tried to understand
her ravings.  This, with Ginsberg’s struggle to understand his emergent homosexuality,
contributed to a very rocky and confusing childhood for Ginsberg.  Despite this, however,
he grew up to be an intelligent and mentally stable man.  
	Ginsberg was interested in poetry, but his father wanted him to go into law, so he
entered Columbia University with a law major.  While he was at Columbia, Ginsberg met
Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and a host of other young men, who were not terribly
reputable.  Allen Ginsberg was eventually suspended from Columbia for a number of
offenses, among them allowing friends to stay over in his dorm room and writing
obscenities on his dorm windows.  This was a rather serious setback for Ginsberg’s legal
career, but his future as a writer was just beginning.
	One evening, while Ginsberg was in his apartment, reading some poetry by William
Blake, he began to hear Blake reading the poetry aloud to him.  Ginsberg viewed this as a
divine vision, and he decided to be a poet.  However, by the age of 29, Ginsberg had
still not written any poetry.  Becoming very frustrated with both his writing and the legal
trouble his friends got him into, Ginsberg went through a phase in which he tried to
normalize himself.  He got a job in marketing research and wrote an ad for Ipana
toothpaste.  He even claimed that he was heterosexual and began dating a woman.  
	Had this phase of Ginsberg’s life been much longer, we might not have ever seen the
immense collection of beautiful and powerful poetry he created.  Fortunately, though,
while visiting his mother at a mental institution, Ginsberg met Carl Solomon, a regular at
the institution.  Solomon became Ginsberg’s teacher and dear friend.  Ginsberg was forced
to watch Carl Solomon descend into the pits of insanity and desperate frustration.  At one
point, Solomon was so pained by his madness that he begged for a lobotomy.  Like the
tragedy of Kerouac’s brother’s death, Carl Solomon’s madness both hurt Ginsberg
terribly and inspired his art.  
	Allen Ginsberg wrote his most famous poem “Howl” for and primarily about Carl
Solomon.  “Howl” is a three part poem, the first part of which was read at the Six Gallery
Poetry Reading, in 1955.  The poem was so emotional and intense that some listeners left
the gallery crying.  Unfortunately, the language and subject matter of “Howl”
offended some people, and a long obscenity trial ensued in 1956.  The case was finally
dropped, and “Howl” was published by City Lights, the company owned by Lawrence
Ferlenghetti.  
	“Howl” made people begin to listen to Allen Ginsberg, and he began writing with a
frenzy.  He completed a 50-page poem called “Kaddish” about his mother, and many other
influential and powerful works, such as “Is About,” “America,” and “A Supermarket in
California.”  Unlike Kerouac, Ginsberg became very involved in the “hippie” scene in the
1960s.  He joined Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey in their “Acid Tests,” he experimented
with LSD and other hallucinogens, he spoke out vehemently against the Vietnam war, and
he became such a politically active man that the FBI even had a file on him, calling him an
“Internal Security” case.  
	Allen Ginsberg remained an active author and political figure throughout his entire
life, and he influenced many people.  Bob Dylan cites Ginsberg as one of the authors he
“can stand,” and he appears in a film and a music video by Dylan.  Allen Ginsberg
joined with poet and author Anne Waldman to establish a poetry school, the Jack Kerouac
School of Disembodied Poets, in 1970.  Ginsberg died of a stroke in 1997, leaving behind
him a legacy of pure, honest writing that defined one generation and inspired countless
others.  There was standing room only at his funeral, and the rabbi said Ginsberg
“represented kindness and sincerity... Our texts say speak the truth, be unafraid.  Allen
Ginsberg was such a man."  
	The third major figure in the early Beat movement was William S. Burroughs. 
Burroughs, born in 1914, grew up in St. Louis.  He belonged to an upperclass family, and
his grandfather, also named William Burroughs, was the inventor of the adding machine.  
Not much is known about Burroughs’ childhood, but he got an
English degree from Harvard.  Instead of a career in English, however, Burroughs chose to
move to New York and pursue a life “of crime."  He began to
consort with petty thieves and heroin addicts, becoming addicted to heroin and morphine
himself.  While in New York, in his mid 30s, Burroughs met Columbia students Jack
Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
	William Burroughs did not begin writing seriously when Kerouac and Ginsberg did,
but he always encouraged their efforts.  He wrote two novels, Junky and Queer, the first of
which was published by Carl Solomon’s uncle, and the second of which was published
years later, due to its racy content.  
	Burroughs moved to Texas to try to stop his heroin habit, but he had difficulty, and
so he took his wife Joan with him to Mexico to avoid the police, who seemed to constantly
pursue him.  While in Mexico, Burroughs, trying to impress some friends, put a glass on
his wife’s head and tried to shoot it off.  She was killed instantly.  Burroughs was
terribly disturbed by this mishap, and he said that his only option was to “write his way
out of it."  He moved to Tangier, Morocco, a popular place for
expatriate writers and began to write piles of heroin-induced ravings.  Kerouac and
Ginsberg visited him once, found these papers, and assembled them into the book that
would be published as Naked Lunch.  
	This method of taking chunks of writing and piecing them together out of order was
called the “cut up method,” and it was pioneered by Burroughs.  Naked Lunch made
William Burroughs very famous, and although he was not originally considered one of the
“Beat” writers, his raw, honest style makes many concede that he could be considered so. 
Burroughs died in 1997 of a heart attack, and he was sorely missed by the artistic
community.  Burroughs appeared in a U2 video, collaborated with Kurt Cobain on a
spoken word CD, and appeared in a Nike commercial.  He is cited by such artists are Lou
Reed and David Bowie as an influence.  
	The broad generalization “beat” encompasses a group of many more than three. 
Gregory Corso, Leroi Jones, Gary Snyder, Peter Orlovsky, and Diane Di Prima are only
some of the others who contributed greatly to this movement.  Allen Ginsberg, Jack
Kerouac, and William Burroughs, however, were at the beginning and at the heart of this
pure and honest movement.  They influenced the world around them and the worlds that
were yet to come.

Take me back to Allen Ginsberg!
Take me back home!

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