The Beat Generation

The Beat Generation was not a bunch of hype like today's so-called 'Generation X'. Where Generation X is supposed to encompass millions of people identified by age, the Beat Generation was a small group of adult writers, based in New York or the San Francisco Bay Area and highly connected to the publishing industry. Supposedly, the name and phone number of virtually every Beat writer was in Allen Ginsberg's address book. If Generation X is like Woodstock, the Beat Generation was like a small dark tavern at two in the morning, with a bunch of old jazz musicians jamming on stage and Jack Kerouac buying rounds at the bar.

We think of the Beat Generation as a phenomenon of the 50's, but the term was invented by Jack Kerouac in 1948 (for a discussion of the origin of this and other labels, check out Lost, Beat and Hip). The phrase was then introduced to the general public in 1952 when Kerouac's friend John Clellon Holmes wrote an article, 'This is the Beat Generation,' for the New York Times Magazine (click here to read the complete original article).

There's a lot of Beat-related material on the web. Rather than list all the links in one page (what fun is that?), I try to sprinkle links throughout my pages. A few good starting places are my Beat News page, my list of Beat-related films (which is horribly incomplete, but I'll update it someday), my page of Beat Connections In Music (which I try hard to keep as complete as I can), my list of books about the Beats (the sources of most of the info in Literary Kicks), my friend Sherri's extensive bibliography of books by the Beats and finally my personal note, Why I Like The Beats.

Colin Pringle maintains a list of Beat links as part of his Wild Bohemian Home Page. Vesuvio, a vintage Beat drinking spot in the North Beach section of San Francisco has a cool site, but don't visit at work if you have a sound card -- it plays music (I found this out the hard way). Bohemian Ink has a lot of good links to the kinds of writers we all like, Michael Bowen's Beat Scene is also good, and Rinaldo Rasa of Italy has created a self-titled 'Absolutely Shit-Kicking List' of just about every writer, poet, musician or general-purpose weirdo who has ever been classified as 'beat'. Another beat site I recently ran into and enjoyed is How To Speak Hip by David Eads. Another interesting one is Brian Nation's site. Then there's The Beat Cafe and The Beat Page, both of them admirably thorough and informative. Veering off towards the less logical, don't miss the inexplicable but fun Cosmic Baseball Association's Fantasy Beat Baseball Team.

If you're looking for beat books, City Lights is the all-time classic Beat bookstore. Water Row Books of Sudbury, Massachusetts is a great place to find every Beat thing ever published. Fog City Fact and Fiction (Kerouac.com) is also good, as are two outposts from London, the Compendium Bookstore and the Beatbooks Catalog. The library at Cal Berkeley has an awesome list of beat multimedia resources. You can find some good videotapes and audiotapes at Mystic Fire Video. Also, Hanuman Books has published some interesting, unusual small books by many beat authors (and my wife Meg put their site together!). Ron Whitehead's White Fields Press has some similarly interesting beat stuff.

There's also a usenet newsgroup called alt.books.beatgeneration which is sometimes good. From Summer 1995 to Spring 1998 there was an excellent internet mailing list called BEAT-L which finally fell victim to a gigantic flame war and ceased to exist; a new, more peaceful (we hope) mailing list called SUBTERRANEANS was created to carry on, and you can read more about this list here.

Finally ... If you've had enough of all this nonsense and just want to read some actual Beat texts, here's a few I typed up.

Literary Kicks
by Levi Asher