The Beat Generation

The Beat Generation describes the countercultural subgrouping of the “Greatest Generation,” born circa-1920. The term beat was adopted from contemporary street slang by the circle of writers that included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginbsberg, William S. Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, and John Clellon Holmes, who used it to evoke the disillusionment and world-weariness of their generation, who had spent childhood amidst the Great Depression, and whose entry into adulthood was during World War II.

Jazz—in particular the bebop and hard bop styles of the 1950s—was the soundtrack of the Beat Generation, the “birth of the cool.” For many, the spontaneous, improvisational nature of the music seemed to reflect their own desire to break away from the rigid, narrow conformity of postwar America. Poets, writers, and artists of the Beat Generation sought to incorporate the free-flowing rhythms of jazz into their own creative process.

Through the Eisenhower years, the McCarthy era, the beginning of the Cold War, and into the 1960s, the Beat Generation transcended its literary, artistic, avant-garde origins, giving voice to many of the social and political concerns of its day, taking on a fairly universal anti-war stance, opposing nuclear proliferation, rejecting consumerism, and advocating for environmental consciousness, along with greater freedom in the realms of sexuality, drugs, and expression.