Not so long ago, there seemed to be a consensus about what constituted the Beat generation. At its heart lay the triumvirate of Jack Kerouac (the “King of the Beats”), Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, respective authors of the Beat hypercanon, On the Road (1957), “Howl” (1956), and Naked Lunch (1959). Revolving around them was an outer circle of poets and novelists, including Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, LeRoi Jones (later, Amiri Baraka), John Clellon Holmes, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure, as well as the charismatic Neal Cassady, “secret hero” of “Howl” and the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road. For some, the canon could be extended into the 1960s to incorporate figures such as Bob Dylan, Richard Brautigan, and Tuli Kupferberg, the last of whom not only jumped into the East River as an unnamed figure in “Howl” but also, a...
The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats
Women Writers of the Beat Era: Autobiography and Intertextuality
World Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature
Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory
Christopher Gair is senior lecturer in English and American studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He is the author of Complicity and Resistance in Jack London’s Novels: From Naturalism to Nature (1997), The American Counterculture, 1945–1972 (2007), and The Beat Generation (2008), as well as numerous essays on American literary naturalism and on Beat generation fiction. Most recently, he is coeditor of Marxism, Colonialism, and Cricket: C. L. R. James’s “Beyond a Boundary” (2018). He is coeditor of Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations.
Christopher Gair; The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats
Women Writers of the Beat Era: Autobiography and Intertextuality
World Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature
Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory. American Literature 1 June 2020; 92 (2): 400–403. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8267912
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