Origin of name

Characteristics.

The Beat Generation works highlighted the primacy of such Beat Generation essentials as spontaneity, open emotion, visceral engagement in often gritty worldly experiences; in a seeming paradox, the Beats often emphasized a spiritual yearning, using concepts and imagery from Buddhism, Judaism, Catholicism, and so on. Thus members of the Beat Generation sought a synthesis of the "beaten down" and the "beatific," as Kerouac described it. One of the best-publicized aspects of Beat writing is the continual challenge to the limits of free expression; the Beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.

The language and topics (drug use, sexuality, aberrant behavior) pushed the boundaries of acceptability in the conformist 1950's. The first "Beat" work to gain nationwide attention was Ginsberg's Howl based partly on its graphic sexual language; an obscenity-trial helped fuel its fame. One of the most enduringly famous "Beat" works, Kerouac's On the Road (written in 1951), which had much of its objectionable material edited out, was not published until 1957, in a sense capitalizing on the fame brought by the Howl obscenity-trial; Kerouac was subsequently accused of encouraging delinquency. Burroughs' magnum opus, Naked Lunch, which was much more graphic than Howl, likewise went to trial for obscenity after its 1962 American publication. These trials helped to establish that, if anything was deemed to have literary value, it was no longer considered obscene.^[2]

Author Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948, generalizing from his social circle to characterize the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York at that time; the name came up in conversation with the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who published an early novel about the beat generation, titled Go, in 1952, along with a manifesto of sorts in the New York Times Magazine: "This is the beat generation.") The adjective "beat" came to the group through the underworld association with Herbert Huncke where it originally meant "tired" or "beaten down." Kerouac expanded the meaning of the term, over time adding the paradoxical connotations of "upbeat," "beatific," and the musical association of being "on the beat:" the Beat Generation was on the bottom, but they were looking up. Other adjectives discussed by Holmes and Kerouac were "found" and "furtive."

Kerouac's claim that he had identified (and embodied) a new trend analogous to the influential Lost Generation might have seemed grandiose at the time, but in retrospect it's clear that he was correct – though possibly largely because the prophecy was self-fulfilling.^[3][4]

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