Beat Generation Literary Criticism

Abstract

_T -he Beat generation of writers sought literary achievement, but contemporary fashion, entertainment, and opinion columnists granted them much more notice than did literary critics. When Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road (1957) and the unwitting Daddy of the Beatniks, died in 1969 with only one of his twenty-some books in print, the Beat generation seemed destined to fade away, maybe to be remembered primarily as precursors to the politically engaged hippie movement. Time has proven otherwise. In the thirty years following Kerouac's death, more than a dozen biographers have covered his life, replacing the popular press's snapshots with deeply researched tomes that depict a serious and dedicated writer at work. The other major Beat writers-Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs, who all died in the past decade-have likewise had their lives recorded by biographers. References to the Beat writers in popular songs, movies, and television shows constitute a further tribute to their cultural relevance and to the popularity they maintain with the public at large. As distance from the 1950s increased and the 1960s counterculture bore fruit with solid social developments in the 1970s and beyond, many social critics overhauled earlier dismissals of the Beats' significance. It is now clear that the Beats