The Beat Generation

At the end of the forties, in New York cafés and then San Francisco bookshops, a few friends decided to write as one speaks and to live as one writes. Kerouac typed On the Road on a continuous roll of paper so as not to break the breath, Ginsberg read Howl aloud in 1955 to a roaring room, Burroughs cut up and reassembled his own sentences. Drugs, jazz, Buddhism, homosexuality and obscenity trials: the Beat Generation imposed a literature of orality and of the body, and opened the counterculture of the sixties.

works 5

• PoetryHowl and Other PoemsAllen Ginsberg · 1956The poem was read in public, in a San Francisco gallery, before it was printed, and the collection was tried for obscenity.Literature
• NovelOn the RoadJack Kerouac · 1957A barely fictionalised account of real journeys, the novel made its author the voice of a generation that he himself had named Beat.Literature
• PoetryGasolineGregory Corso · 1958The collection is dedicated to the angels of Clinton, the state prison where its author had served a sentence in his youth.Literature
• PoetryA Coney Island of the MindLawrence Ferlinghetti · 1958Part of the collection was written for the stage: its author read his poems with jazz musicians in a San Francisco club.Literature
• NovelNaked LunchWilliam S. Burroughs · 1959The book was assembled in haste, in the order in which its sections had been found and typed, and can be read from any page.Literature