Getting Hep to the Beat

Getting Hep to the Beat

In the mid 1940’s a movement began, a generation of writers and poets would emerge; they were called the ‘Beat Generation’. The term was first used by Jack Kerouac while talking to fellow writer John C. Holmes, in 1948, Kerouac said to him, “So I guess you might say we’re the beat generation” (What’s Beat). The ‘Beat Generation’ was a movement that influenced the next generation of young rebellious minds of the 1950’s and ‘60’s through poets and writers who did not follow the rules of society. Growing up I have always liked the poets and writers of that time, the smooth cool way they talked, the slang they used, the goat-tees and black berets they wore and their cool and casual demeanor. The writers and poets of that generation were so passionate in what they wrote, and in their resistance to conformity. Not caring to be like everyone else, instead, they sought to be the individuals that they were, not bowing to what mainstream society thought they should be. Freedom of individuality was their passion. Although it wasn’t until I was older that I really understood what they meant and stood for, the movement had a deeper meaning; to be yourself.

A smoke filled bar, jazz music in the background and a poet, young men with goat-tees, some high on marijuana, listening intently and mutters a common phrase in those days of the beat poets, ‘cool daddy-o, I really dig that cat’. Like a lot of the young writers and poets of the late 1940’s and 50’s, the crowded bars were filled with people who were in some way influenced by writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, Neil Cassady and William Burroughs, all of whom were at the core of the movement that has endured in one way or another to this day.

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... of great change in America, an upheaval, a time when the once silent voices of the mainstream of society rose up and made themselves be heard. For better or worse it was a time that changed us all forever. In doing this essay I became truly aware of who those first bold few were as writers, pots and visionaries. During my research of the writers and poets Jack Kerouac has intrigued me the most from his first publication in 1950 of “The Town and The City”, to the disappointing seven years of rejection to having his most notable work “On The Road” published in 1957, to the tale of his downward spiral out of control “Big Sur” which may have been his best work before his death in 1969.

Works Cited

History of the Beat Generation (What’s Beat)

http://verein.chillout-pdm.de/beatgeneration/beatis.htm

Beat Generation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Generation