Beat Writers Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs
by David Bianco
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs met in the early
1940s in New York City, forming the core of a loosely knit group of mostly gay or
bisexual writers who espoused nonconformity and experimentation in both
life and literature.
Kerouac coined the term "Beat generation" - meaning "beat down" - in 1948.
"The point of Beat," Ginsberg wrote in the 1950s, "is that you get beat down
to a certain nakedness where you are actually able to see the world in a
visionary way."
Using the apartment of Joan Vollmer (later Burroughs's common-law wife) as
their headquarters, the writers hammered out the ideas that became central to
their creative vision: An artist's consciousness could be positively expanded
through hallucinatory drugs; art could not be held to conventional morality;
and above all, artists had to resist self-censorship and revision, to have
"no fear or shame," Kerouac wrote, "in the dignity of yr (sic)
experience, language & knowledge."
The Beats' intimate attachments over the years comprise an elaborate daisy
chain that is hard to keep track of without a chart. Vollmer pursued
Burroughs, who pursued Ginsberg, who pursued Kerouac, who pursued various
women, including the two wives of his pal, Neal Cassady, who was pursued
by Ginsberg, who finally settled down with Peter Orlovsky.
At first, the Beats seemed doomed to literary obscurity. But in 1955, while
visiting Cassady in San Francisco, Ginsberg wrote the poem that put him and
his circle on the literary map. Composed over the course of a few days, in
part while high on peyote, "Howl" addressed Ginsberg's homosexuality in bold,
raw language, celebrating, for example, those "who let themselves be fucked
in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy" - a literary first.
On the evening of October 13, 1955, Ginsberg delivered what he later called
"a very wild, funny, tearful reading" of "Howl" at Six Gallery, a bohemian
hangout in San Francisco. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner of City Lights
Bookstore and publisher of avant-garde poets, heard the reading and sent
Ginsberg a telegram the following day: "When do I get the manuscript?"
Howl and Other Poems appeared in August 1956, but it received little public
attention until May 1957, when the manager of City Lights, Shigeyoshi Murao,
unknowingly sold a copy to two plainclothes police officers. Over 500 copies
of the little book were seized by the U.S. Customs Office, and Ferlinghetti
and Murao were arrested for obscenity. The trial that followed that summer,
with ACLU lawyers arguing passionately for the two men's First Amendment
rights, was covered by the national media. Ferlinghetti and Murao were found
not guilty, and Ginsberg and the Beats rocketed to renown. Kerouac's novel,
On the Road, published in the fall, became an immediate bestseller;
Ginsberg and Kerouac became pop icons; and the press coined a new word,
"beatnik," meaning a disaffected youth who dropped out of the
conventional culture of the 1950s.
Burroughs achieved his own notoriety with Naked Lunch, a novel that
depicted not only homosexuality and drug addiction, but also cannibalism
and other atrocities, and demonstrated the author's extensive off-color
vocabulary. Naked Lunch survived two separate obscenity trials, with the
U.S. Supreme Court deciding in 1966 that the novel was not obscene
because its intent was not to appeal to "a prurient interest in sex."
The legacy of the Beat generation's discontented youth can be seen in events
of the 1960s and early 1970s, including the sexual revolution and the gay
liberation movement. And today the once renegade Beats are often included in the literary canon.
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