Beat Movement Research Articles

The Burden of Legend: Beat Studies in the Twenty-First Century

This review considers five new books related to the Beat Movement. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, compiles a vast wealth of exchanges between the two Beat icons, spanning several decades of their friendship. Bill Morgan’s new history, The Typewriter is Holy , presents an extensive overview of the movement, encompassing key figures and events in an accessible narrative. Todd F. Tietchen’s book, The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana , focuses on the experiences of Beat authors in Cuba and provides an in-depth analysis of how Cuban-American interchanges influenced the political orientations of these Beat writers, claiming that Cuba’s early revolutionary era inspired radical Beat politic while later serving as a cautionary example. In Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence , Erik Mortenson argues that Beat artistic practices should be understood as a “poetics of presence” and re-periodizes Beat literature as early postmodern. For the 25th anniversary of the publication of William S. Burroughs’s Queer , Oliver Harris has edited a new, substantially changed edition of the novel. In his introduction, Harris provides his rationale guiding the changes and examines the scope of the novel’s politics.

Historical dictionary of the Beat movement

Editor's Foreword Jon Woronoff Preface Chronology Introduction The Dictionary Bibliography About the Author

Self-Narratives and Editorial Marks: Inventing Hettie Jones

In 1999, writer Hettie Jones published an essay titled “Babes in Boyland,” in which she reflected on what it meant to be a woman during the 1950s' Beat movement in New York City: Sex of course—let'...

The typewriter is holy: the complete, uncensored history of the Beat generation

In this highly entertaining work, Bill Morgan,a leading authority on the movement and a man who personally knew most of the Beats, narrates the history of these writers as primarily a social group of friends, tracing their origins together during the World War II years to the full blossoming of their notoriety in the late 1950s to their profound influence on the social upheaval of the 1960s. Indeed, it is impossible to comprehend the sixties without first grasping the importance of the social ripples set in motion by the Beats a decade earlier. This is a sweeping, indispensable story about the discontented free spirits of the Beat Movement. We watch their peripatetic lives, their sexual misadventures, their ambivalent response to fame. We are reminded above all that while their personal lives may have not have been holy, their typewriters and their lasting words very much were.

Allen Ginsberg's Biographical Gestures

As Beat archivist turned biographer Bill Morgan makes clear in the title of his recent biography of Allen Ginsberg, I Celebrate Myself: Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (2006), Ginsberg's and works are subject to a Whitmanian commerce of publicity and privacy. Having authorized and aided in the production of his letter and journal collections, Ginsberg reveals an intense awareness of the literary-historical importance of his own development as a poet. As I will demonstrate below, a close look at the archival record of his early (pre-Howl) career reveals that Ginsberg has always exercised an editor's control of the face of his private life. In fact, Ginsberg's development of this editorial control of biography and the development of his craft as a poet take place concurrently. Indeed, in reference to Ginsberg's role in the publication of his journals, Mark Schechner explains that Ginsberg understands . . . that he matters less as a poet than as a figure, an exemplary life (334). I will continue this argument, examining Ginsberg's real-time modification of the historical record about the production of his breakthrough poem, The Green Automobile. Alleging to have written the poem in concert with a three-way letter exchange with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, Ginsberg crafts a biographical gesture that formalizes public privacy as the essential condition of Beat literary production. In other words, he highlights the importance of intimate, collaborative exchange as a precondition to the kind of revolutionary texts that have emerged from the Beat movement. Ginsberg's careful manipulation and publication of written materials not originally intended to be (i.e., letters and journals) marks Ginsberg as a curator of his private life. His goal in part, as Schechner claims, is to clarif[y] the example of his extraordinarily singular (334). But Ginsberg's biographical gestures are also poetic gestures; they expand the palette of the poet from the published poem into the gritty realms of private life. Making authorial use of things other than poetic lines, Ginsberg indicates that his poems extend, like the declamatory lines of Howl beyond the orthodoxy of published print. In a sense, then, I continue a conversation,

The collected poems of Philip Whalen

One of the most path-breaking and creatively radical poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, Philip Whalen was part of the 1955 Six Gallery reading where the West Coast Beat movement famously began. Working alongside Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac, Whalen developed a conversational and visually unorthodox style that is unique in contemporary poetry. His lifelong engagement with the impermanent and sensuous, concerns deepened by his commitment to Zen Buddhism, are on rich display here, along with his warm humor and original illustrations. This Collected Poems rightfully places Whalen among the foremost poets of his time, offering readers a truly major body of American poetic work.

'Confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought': a reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poetry

Much critical writing about the Beat Movement has focused on the strong interrelationship between the literary and social discourses within and around the movement. However, the study of Beat literature also necessitates an awareness of its position within the literary discourse of the twentieth century. Beat writing may be seen as standing in the unstable, shifting territory between two equally unstable, shifting literary movements: modernism and postmodernism. Beat poetry pits itself against high modernism and the New Critical tradition, draws upon some aspects of early avant-garde modernism, and simultaneously remoulds these aspects into what may be regarded as the beginnings of postmodernism in the USA. This article presents a reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poetry against this literary-historical background. A brief general overview of some of the key characteristics of Beat poetry is given, followed by a discussion of a number of Beat poems, organised around some salient features of Ginsberg’s Beat poetry that may be linked to Beat poetry’s position in the transition from modernism to postmodernism.

脈波と体動信号による睡眠指標

脈波と体動信号による睡眠指標

Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: creating countercultural community

In Snyder and the Rim, Timothy Gray draws upon previously unpublished journals and letters, as well as his own close readings of Gary Snyder's well-crafted poetry and prose to track the early career of a maverick intellectual whose writings powered the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s. Exploring various aspects of cultural geography, Gray asserts that this west coast literary community seized upon the idea of a regional structure, in part to recognize their Orientalist desires and in part to consolidate their opposition to America's cold war ideology, which tended to divide East from West. The geographical consciousness of Snyder's writing was particularly influential, Gray argues, because it gave San Francisco's Beat and hippie cultures a set of physical coordinates by which they could chart their utopian visions of peace and love. Gray's introduction tracks the increased use of Pacific discourse by politicians and business leaders following World War II. Ensuing chapters analyze Snyder's countercultural invocation of this regional idea, concentrating on the poet's migratory or creaturely sensibility, his gift for literary translation, his physical embodiment of trans-Pacific ideals, his role as tribal spokesperson for Haight-Ashbury hippies, and his burgeoning interest in environmental issues. Throughout, Gray's citations of such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger shed light on Snyder's communal role, providing an amazingly intimate portrait of the west coast counterculture. An interdisciplinary project that utilizes models of ecology, sociology, and comparative religion to supplement traditional methods of literary biography, Snyder and the Rim offers a unique perspective on Snyder's life and work. This book will fascinate literary and Asian studies scholars, as well as the general reader interested in the Beat movement and multicultural influences on poetry.

Chitosan and chitosan/β‐cyclodextrin microspheres as sustained‐release drug carriers

AbstractThe main aim of this study was to compare two microspheres, chitosan (CTS) and CTS/β‐cyclodextrin (β‐CD), made by spray‐drying, as pulmonary sustained drug‐delivery carriers. Theophylline (TH) was used as a model drug. The characteristics of the microspheres and in vitro release were studied. The yield of CTS/β‐CD microspheres was 46.1%, which was higher than that of the CTS microspheres (36.5%). The drug loads of the CTS and CTS/β‐CD microspheres were 22.7 and 21.1%, respectively, whereas the encapsulation efficiencies were 90.7 and 91.4%, respectively. The distribution of 50% [(diameter) d (0.5)] of the CTS microspheres was below 6.49 μm and that of the CTS/β‐CD microspheres was below 4.90 μm. Scanning electron microscopy showed that both microspheres yielded a spherical shape with smooth or wrinkled surfaces. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy demonstrated that the carbonyl group of TH formed hydrogen bonds with the amide group of CTS and the hydroxyl group of β‐CD. The swelling ability of the two microspheres was more than three times their weight, and their humidity rates attained equilibrium within 24 h. The ciliary beat movement times of CTS and CTS/β‐CD microspheres were 493.00 and 512.33 min, respectively, which indicated that the two microspheres effectively reduced the ciliotoxicity and possessed better adaptability. In vitro release of TH from CTS/β‐CD microspheres was slower than that from CTS microspheres at pH 6.8 and provided a sustained release of 72.0% within 12 h. The results suggest that CTS/β‐CD microspheres are a promising carrier for sustained release for pulmonary delivery. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 103: 1183–1190, 2007

Breaking the rule of cool: interviewing and reading women Beat writers

The Beat movement nurtured many female dissidents and artists who contributed to Beat culture and connected the Beats with the second wave of the women's movement. Although they have often been eclipsed by the men of the Beat Generation, the women's contributions to Beat literature are considerable. Covering writers from the beginning of the movement in the 1950s and extending to the present, this book features interviews with nine of the best-known women Beat writers, including Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Brenda Frazer (Bonnie Bremser), Janine Pommy Vega, Anne Waldman, and the critic Ann Charters. Each is presented by a biographical essay that details her literary or scholarly accomplishments. In these recent interviews the nine writers recall their lives in Beat bohemia and discuss their artistic practices. Nancy M. Grace outlines the goals and revelations of the interviews, and introduces the community of female Beat writers created in their conversations with the authors. Although they have not received attention equal to the men, women Beat writers rebelled against mainstream roles for young women and were exuberant participants in creating the Beat scene. Mapping their unique identities in the Beat movement, Ronna C. Johnson shows how their poetry, fiction, and memoirs broke the male rule that defined Beat women as silent bohemian chicks rather than artistic peers. Breaking the Rule of Cool combines the interviews with literary criticism and biography to illustrate the vivacity and intensity of women Beat writers, and argues that American literature was revitalized as much by the women's work as by that of their male counterparts. Nancy M. Grace, a professor of English at the College of Wooster, is the author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Literature, the Beat Scene, and the Artful Dodge. Ronna C. Johnson, a lecturer in English and American Studies at Tufts University, has been published in College Literature, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, and the Poetry Project Newsletter. Johnson and Grace are the editors of and contributors to Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation.

Genesis, structure, and meaning in Gary Snyder's Mountains and rivers without end

This reading of Gary Snyder's book-length poem from its evolution in the mid 1950s to its publication 40 years later traces the work's origins, as well as its themes and structure. It includes references to No drama; East Asian landscape painting; the rhythms of storytelling; chant and song; Jungian archetypal psychology; world mythology; Buddhist philosophy and ritual; Native American traditions; planetary geology; hydrology and ecology. The author examines such personal and cultural influences on Snyder's work as his travels in Asia and his association with the beat movement of the 50s.

Pocket Books to Global Beat: Andrei Voznesensky, Kazuko Shiraishi, Michael Horovitz

The Beat Movement has long been thought to centre only as an American cultural phenomenon and in key names like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso, and with William Burroughs as a presiding dark mentor. This essay argues for a far wider contextual understanding. It looks to Beat currents in the African American poetry of LeRoi Jones/Imamu Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman, a circuit of Beat‐influenced women like Diane Di Prima and Anne Waldman, and a US multicultural arena to include Oscar Zeta Acosta and Maxine Hong Kingston. Most of all it analyses the Beat impact beyond America in three prime names: Andrei Voznesensky as leading 1960s–1970s Russian dissident poet, Kazuko Shiraishi as longtime vintage Tokyoite jazz‐and‐poetry ‘bad girl’, and Michael Horovitz as British counter‐culture voice. In these three Beat acquires a global reach, a force of vision, a poetics, well beyond Greenwich Village or City Lights Bookshop, San Francisco. It also links the local, miniaturist Pocket Poets series established by Ferlinghetti with his own Pictures of a Gone World (1955) to Beat writings which can best be thought at once national and transnational. Given this larger cultural context, the essay analyzes a relevant body of verse by Vosnesensky, Shiraishi and Horovitz, with particular attention given to vision, image, the shaping language each poet gives to Beat heritage inaugurated far from their own beginnings.

Existential America. By George Cotkin. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xii, 359 pp. $39.95, isbn 0-8018-7037-2.)

George Cotkin's Existential America is an ambitious attempt to probe the origins and development of an attitude that cut through much of the social, political, and cultural history of the United States. According to the author, the existential grounds of American culture from the early settlements onwards “functioned not as benumbing forces, but as goads to action and commitment” (p. 7). Along with native sources such as transcendentalism, pragmatism, and the most prominent members of the American Renaissance, Cotkin includes Søren Kierkegaard, whose work he deems to be crucial in the development of existentialism in America since the late 1940s, vis-à-vis its French counterparts. I find very illuminating the tension that Cotkin details between the New York intellectuals, on the one hand, and the European existentialists, especially Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beau-voir, on the other. Also, he sheds light on the complexity of the American group from a perspective that diverges from those of Alan Wald and Harvey Teres, among other historians who have researched them. Cotkin too devotes space to canonical literary productions of American existentialism, pays special attention to the African American writers Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright and several representatives of the beat movement, and devotes an enlightening section to the maverick Norman Mailer, whose essay “The White Negro” (1957) actually led literary and cultural historians to rethink the differences between the European and American factions of existentialism.

Riprap of Things: Subject and Object in Gary Snyder’s Early Poetry

R ip r a p o f T h i n g s : S u b j e c t a n d O b j e c t in G a r y S n y d e r ’s E a r l y P o e t r y L o u i s e M i l l s In this essay, I will focus on the way in which Gary Snyder takes issue with the commonly assumed structure of a separation of subject and object by which the exchange between reader and text becomes distant and restricted. The works of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer provide me with a useful bridge between the vocabulary and discourses of a Western comparative literature department and those of Zen Buddhism, to which Snyder constantly turns.1 In particular, Snyder’s exploration of the breakdown of a separation between subject and object arises largely out of his study of Zen Buddhism. Heidegger and Gadamer have been foremost in the critique of this separation in m odem times. Although Snyder has worked with well-known figures of the Beat movement, such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he is not as widely known as these writers, and he resists being classified as a “Beat writer.” His poetry, which is in the tradition of the meditative lyric, differs from the long lines and speech rhythms of Kerouac and Ginsberg, yet there are points of similarity in the outlook of Snyder and these writers. For example, Snyder’s fascination with what are often termed “alternative” ideas and practices in the West and the East— what he himself terms “the subculture”— has led him to believe that “the subculture is the main line and what we see around us is the anomaly” (Real Work 68). He lives and writes according to these various ideas and practices and is therefore reluctant to be confined by geographical or stylistic labels. Although Snyder identifies with the term Zen Buddhism, he does not feel restricted by this identification: You know, calling yourself a Buddhist is not like calling your­ self a Catholic or a Christian. It’s not a label that defines you right away as a member of a sect with a set ideology. Buddhism is a way of mind, a kind of way of seeing the world, that can embrace all of those other things and then still go beyond it. ... There are no Buddhists; there are just people who are on the way. (Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation) For Snyder, Zen Buddhism is not a system of thought but an opening “that can embrace all of those other things and then still go beyond it.” 3 1 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F A L L 2 0 0 4 The influence of this “way of mind, a kind of way of seeing the world” is evident throughout Snyders writing life. In a 1976 interview, Snyder defines what he sees as the “value and function of poetry”: One side of it is in-time, the other is out-of-time. The in-time side of it is to tune us in to mother nature and human nature so that we live in time, in our societies in a way and on a path in which all things can come to fruition equally, and together in har­ mony. A path of beauty. And the out-of-time function of poetry is to return us to our own true original nature at this instant for­ ever. And those two things happen, sometimes together, some­ times not, here and there and all over the world, and always have. (Real Work 73) The polarity here is between structure and the absence of structure. Within poetry, Snyder suggests, our usual notion of temporal structures coexists with a release from this notion. He acknowledges the simultane­ ity of theoretical structure and lack of structure and does not view this simultaneity as paradoxical. In fact, he views both poetry and the world as at once structured by theoretical distinctions and...

Women's place in the beat movement: bonnie bremser frazer's troia: mexican memoirs

This article examines Bonnie Bremser Frazer, a little-known Beat author, and her account of a year spent in Mexico with her husband, poet Ray Bremser, and their infant daughter, Rachel. Pressured by Ray to become the family “breadwinner,” Frazer became a prostitute while struggling to fulfill her obligations as mother and wife. Frazer's fictionalized autobiography, Troia: Mexican Memoirs, has the momentum, heightened consciousness, and attentiveness to detail of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, on which it was modeled, but it explores specifically female experiences. The article seeks to place Frazer's experiences and writing in their post World War II historical context, before well-developed late 20th-century critiques of established gender roles, and to understand Frazer's self-revelatory effort to transform the multiple contradictions impinging on her life into a literary text. The conclusion suggests the multiple implications of Frazer's text for later generations of women readers, particularly contemporary college students.

Cold War Correspondents: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady, and the Political Economy of Beat Letters

On June 23, 1953, an aspiring poet employed as a copyboy for New York World Telegram wrote a long letter to an old friend in San Jose. The letter ends by reproducing a telegraph sent to President Eisenhower protesting what David Caute has called the midsummer's night of postwar anti-Communist, anti-Soviet hysteria (62)--the electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, so-called spies: are pathetic, government Will sordid, execution obscene America caught in crucifixion machine only barbarians want them burned I say stop it before we fill our souls with death-house horror (Ginsberg, As Ever 150). Since copyboy was Allen Ginsberg and friend Neal Cassady, letter witnesses a precise intersection of dominant narrative action of early Cold War America and its dissident counternarrative as represented by key figures in emergent Beat movement. However, in context of exemplary character of Beat cultural politics, Ginsberg's telegram of public protest is not just atyp ical--his friends were shocked at him for doing anything outright about his political complaints (Carolyn Cassady, Off Road 222)--but anomalous. What's important is not intersecting of narratives, personal and political, dominant and dissenting, but their correspondence. Defining relation between Cold War and Beat generation along double axis private/public and personal/political, Ginsberg's letter turns out to be a key document, and this unlikely point of departure brings to light a scene that is central to what might be termed political economy of Beat letters. The Rosenberg case was one of a series of national and highly public trials stamped by paranoid style of American politics, a style that responded to global stalemate by waging domestic war on enemies within. This was a total conflict fought on microscopic scale and through inflated symbolic dramas, so that early Cold War years were marked by an unprecedented politicization of culture and by conscription of private life in name of national security. The key to political containment abroad was, then, personal self-containment at home, and Cold War penetration of private by public was as much a matter of patriotic self-policing and voluntary self-censorship as of panoptic state surveillance. In context of this disciplinary and demonizing feature of Cold War culture, hyperbolic escalation of Rosenbergs into evil atom spies--condemned to death by Judge Irving Kaufman for a diabolical conspiracy to destroy a God-fearing nation (qtd. in Caute 67)--represented a definitive es calation of local. The Rosenberg case did not prove that scientific secrets vital to national security had been betrayed. Rather, it proved assumption that an absolute secret existed in first place--what Caute called Myth of Vital Secret--and that it might be given away by what passed for ordinary men and women. Absolute secrets demand absolute secrecy. The Secret therefore motivates all secrets of everyday life and equals their apocalyptically scaled-up master narrative: it symbolized total implications of mundane acts in a war whose front line was, ideally, not just here or there but everywhere and implicating everyone. What turned Rosenberg case into a central document in this politicized field of Cold War culture was its transformation into a particular kind of text-an epistolary text. I refer to Death House Letters, correspondence between Ethel and Julius from their cells in Sing Sing. This notorious exchange served as vital political propaganda for Rosenbergs at time and was then used as an essential text against their intellectual sympathizers in aftermath of their deaths. Here I refer to articles in Commentary and Encounter by Robert Warshaw and Leslie Fiedler respectively, two cultural critics who took it upon themselves to subject Rosenbergs to a second trial, this time by New Critical close readings of their letters. …

The Subculture of the Beats: A Sociological Revisit

Introduction Much has been written about the literary works and life-histories of key figures of the Beat Generation: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Clellon Holmes, Gary Snyder, and others (for overviews, see Charters, and Penguin Book of the Beats). More recently, lesser-known figures the literary Beat movement (including women and black Beats) have also been studied more closely from such a perspective (Knight; Lee, Beat Generation). Many intimate details about the vicissitudes of daily life within the inner circle of the Beats, and their interactions with the outside world, have been disclosed. These historical facts are now well established, but little has been done terms of assessing the movement sociologically. With the benefit of historical hindsight based increased scholarly understanding of cultural developments the United States during the 1950s and early 1960s, it may be worthwhile to look back at the Beats from a sociological perspective,1 despite the explicit admonition against such sociologizing written by a Beat poet 1959 (JOY). On the other hand, we will seek to go beyond an observer's view at the time who found it hard to imagine that Kerouac's writings in the far future would be read for anything except sociology: what it was like to bum around the country with junkies and supposed Zen addicts; this what it was like to live a typical Beatnik's pad; this what it was like to be sent by a Charlie Parker record, and so on (Moore 385). Undoubtedly, the writings of Kerouac and other Beats can stand their own, having intrinsic literary merits, but this essay not concerned so much with the aesthetic qualities of Beat artistic products. Instead, the primary focus the Beat subculture and its constituting enclaves and scenes. Borrowing partly from contemporary sources and critical studies of autobiographical and selfreflective writings by participants, an analysis will be made of the basic sociological characteristics of the Beat underground. First, I will introduce the Beats as a Bohemian subculture and expressive social movement. Second, I will take a closer look at the intricate interplay between the media images and the real identities of the Beats, because of the former's impact the Beats' life-world. Third, I will elaborate the Beats' ethos (beliefs, values and attitudes), through a critical revisit of a sociological analysis of the Beats done at the time. This will be followed by a similar analysis of the substance of the Beats' cultural practices. Last, I will present my conclusions about the Beats as a complex sociocultural phenomenon. A Bohemian Subculture and Expressive Social Movement From a historical and sociological perspective, the Beats were a part of post-World War II Bohemian culture the U.S. and constituted a subcultural movement that opposed square, bourgeois culture; the Beats dubbed people squares whom previous Bohemians called Philistines and bourgeoises (Moore 378). In various respects, the Beats were a continuation of a Bohemian movement that has an extended history itself. More generally, Bohemians can be defined as persons who as writers or artists are living an unconventional life usually a colony with others (Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary 124). Bohemianism as such has always had a strong affiliation with the development of avant-garden as movements within art; significantly, Bohemia has been called the underworld of art (Snyderman and Josephs). Historically, there have also been interrelationships between artistic and sociopolitical vanguards which have tended both to converge and to diverge from each other. The Bohemian culture itself is characterized by an active, though perhaps, irregular communalism and group dynamic. In this sense, the Bohemian subculture can also be read terms of a movement, or an interwoven artistic community (Allan 257. …

The beat generation: a bibliographical teaching guide

Discusses the appropriate place for the in the literary canon and curriculum and provides an overview of teaching practices at schools and universities throughout the United States. Individual chapters on general Beat literature, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac provide the substance of the bibliography. Annotated references for primary and secondary materials include audio tapes, videos, CD-ROMs, and web sites, as well as standard printed sources. Besides the famous triumvirate of Beat writers, The Beat Generation features a section entitled Other Beats which includes bibliographical paragraphs on seventy-five authors and editors associated with the Beat movement.

The Beat Generation: a reference pathfinder

Provides direction for researchers, collections developers, and other interested people to locate sources of information on The Beat Generation. Focussing on the primary period of Beat Generation productivity, 1951‐1960, and on the Beat Generation’s two principal milieux, San Francisco’s North Beach and New York City’s Greenwich Village, this pathfinder gives prominence to the works of the two defining figures of the Beat Generation: Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, whose seminal works, respectively Howl and On the Road, inspired a generation of “beatniks” and paved the way for the Hippie flowering and Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Emphasis is placed on the background, context, and impact of the Beat Movement, rather than on a critical analysis of their work.