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BEAT AUTHORS
Other beat authors
The 1950s saw the emergence of the
group of American writers [E2] who were later labeled " Beat": Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg became the spokemen of the "movement". The Beats were living symbols of
rebellion and unconventional lifestyles. Through their experimental
writing techniques influenced by pre-war avantgarde authors, like John
Dos Passos , and by the rhythms of jazz, they assaulted the puritanical
conservatism of post-war America , embracing Eastern philosophies and
religions. The literary innovation the Beats represented can be seen as
a reaction to the academic school of T.S. Eliot [I1] and Ezra Pound [E1] , whom
they attacked on the grounds of non-commitment to current issues and
problems.
They used the so-called "hip language", characterized by its vitality
and authenticity, as opposed to conventional language, dull,
conservative, "square", and most of all inadequate for expressing the
new reality.
Their experimental poetry and provocative spirit, though, were to
have more influence on the future prose and pop culture than on poetry
itself. Their work spread across America and Europe giving rise to a
counterculture which had a deep impact on everyday life.
Main Beat poets:
Lawrence Ferlinghetti [E1] was
born in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1919, of Italian and French origins; he
attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and
there he studied and learned to appreciate Hemingway , Dos Passos,
Faulkner and other masters of American literature. Ferlinghetti's poetry was influenced by the
French Surrealists, but this did not prevent him from paying attention
to the socio-political issues of his times: his voice is still
one of the strongest in the condemnation of war and globalization.
Among his best known poems, " A Coney
Island of the Mind"(1958) contained in a collection of poems by
the same name and meant to be read with the accompaniment of jazz
music: it is a scream against the absurdities of American mainstream
society in the 50's.
Gregory Corso [ES2] [F1] was born in
1930, in New York, and had Italian origins like Ferlinghetti; he joined
the Beat scene in the late 1950's, when he moved to the San Francisco
Bay Area. His well-known poem " Bomb "
(1958) was inspired by a demonstration against nuclear weapons in which
he took part in England that year; he was struck by the incredible
amount of hate and violence coming from the people, not by the
atrocity of the bomb everybody was protesting against. " Bomb" is a satiric elegy for the
nuclear bomb, based on the assumption that nothing comes from hate
except hate, and that the human condition has enough tragedy in itself,
there is no need of piling up violence upon violence. The poem is also
remembered for its graphic style: in fact, it is written in the
shape of a mushroom cloud.
Corso died of cancer at 70, in 2001.
Prose writers:
Burroughs
William Burroughs [I2] [ES1] [F1] was born
in St.Louis, in 1914, from a wealthy family; he attended Havard
University and graduated in 1936. In 1951, in Mexico, he accidentally
shot his wife; after that incident, he started to wander through South
America, experimenting with drugs and doing research for his writings.
He adopted an experimental technique
known as " cut-up writing" by
which he reassembled fragments of magazines, instruction manuals and
his own writing into collages
designed to reflect the unrelenting flow of information and the systems
of control that were beginning to shape American life, in the same way
James Joyce , Gertrude Stein and the Dadaists had done three decades
before. His best known novels, The
Naked Lunch (1959) and The
Soft Machine (1961), dealing with the underworld and drug
sub-cultures, in a symbolic and visionary manner criticize
Western society's hypocrisy.
Burroughs died in 1997, aged 83.
Other authors included in the Beat
Generation are:
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