Beat Generation

Beat Generation, term referring to certain American writers of the 1950s whose unconventional work and lifestyle reflected profound disaffection with contemporary society and a desire to escape from suffocating, conventional middle-class values. Instead they sought artistic improvisation and visionary enlightenment, attainable, in their view, through Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, drugs, alcohol, and sex. The writing this lifestyle produced was highly idiosyncratic and unconventional. The poetry and prose of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti provided a stimulus that found its way into art and music, as well as active social protest, and marked the beginnings of a counter-culture that was to have a lasting impact. “Beat”, with its double connotation of depressed and beatific, was first used in this way by Kerouac in about 1952.