The Beat Movement
Following the end of World War Two, many Americans sought a return to normalcy. Conformist social attitudes dominated American society and dictated the direction of the American middle class. While the racially integrative Rock & Roll music helped create a generational gap between the young and old in post war America, the Beat Movement provided an intellectual backbone to the values gap that would divide much of the nation during the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s and the anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s. Young white authors living in New York city began to rebel against the notions of conformity sold to them by the radio and television sets of the 1950s. Inspired in part by the 1920s white Bohemians who took to counter-culture literature and jazz music, "The Beatniks" wanted to break down the social norms of the 1950s with literature and what many Americans saw as hedonistic excess. Those who associated with the Beat Movement were drawn to the New York neighborhood Greenwich Village and the city of San Francisco.
This movement had elements of musical transformation, art and particularly literature. The name "Beat" was derived from old jazz sayings of being beat, or wore down. The Beat Movement used this in context to describe people who were beat down by a social system that valued conformity and saw creativity and individuality as dangerous to the American way of life. The Beats openly discussed sex, drugs, homosexuality, and nonconformity to attack a system that they saw a sterile and oppressive. The Beats had little to do with traditional gender roles, women did not have to conform to the idealized norms of society and the origins of the free love movement are found with this movement. The Beat Movement also explored ideas of eastern religions or attacked the concepts of a Christian dominated society.
[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” |
Some of the most famous authors of the Beat Movement include Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. Ginsberg’s Howl and Burrough’s The Naked Lunch so shocked American readers with passages the included psychedelic experiences, sex, homosexual sex, and a variety of other material that was shocking to mainstream that both books were unsuccessfully put on trial to be censored. Jack Kerouac's book On the Road, tells the story for a group of friends travelling across the country and showcases the immoral nature of humans. The book's characters hate alarm clocks, road maps, mortgages and all things "traditionally American. They instead embrace free love, jazz, natural beauty, sex, drugs and mysticism (non-Christian). It is because of the Beat Movement and the legal attempts to censor it that American views towards censorship and the state intervention against nonconformist speech became more liberal and free.
They challenged society at almost all levels, and while often seen as a fringe movement during the 50s, informed far larger cultural trends for the decades to come. |