Beat Generation

US social and literary movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Members of the Beat Generation, called beatniks, responded to the conformist materialism of the period by adopting lifestyles derived from Henry David Thoreau's social disobedience and Walt Whitman's poetry of the open road. The most influential writers were Jack Kerouac (who is credited with coining the term), Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs.

Other cultural reference points were contemporary jazz, Buddhist philosophy, and the use of psychotropic drugs to heighten experience and affirm their anti-authoritarian stance. The movement had no shared artistic credo beyond breaking the current literary orthodoxy, and its definition was largely historical. Most representative and influential were Kerouac's novel On the Road 1957 and Ginsberg's poem Howl (1956), which used less conventionally structured forms alternately to celebrate the ‘beatific’ spirit of Beat and to indict the repressiveness of modern society. Other prominent literary figures were poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet Gregory Corso, and novelist John Clellon Holmes.