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The Making of A Counter-Culture, Part I: The Beat Generation

© Robert Whillans

This week we look at what events led to the creation of one of the largest countercultures the US of A have ever seen. I'm speaking, of course, of the hippies, who were generally twentysomethings who had lived through more injustices and oppression than teens had seen in a long time. Most of these evils were taken as part of American society, and as with most things before the rock revolution, teens had not much to say about it. The hippies wanted to change that, to completely change American society.

The Beats. Fathers (and mothers) of the flower children. If you compare the two groups, that would seem to be no surprise. But having done it nearly ten years before? How could something that happened in the early fifties affect the mid-sixties?

The Twenties were gone, and with them, the liberation of people's minds. The depression had killed that, and the Second World War brought everyone back to earth. Resposability was more important than enjoyment, and no one even cosidered life without work, without deadlines or even without what were considered to be at the time morals. After the war ended, the Beats came to surface. They were a relatively small group of people, if you compare them to the hippies, who found their niche in New York City. They promoted the lifestyle of the Twenties, and produced new types of literature and art based on individuals writing for themselves and for a community of individuals. After living in New York for the remainder of the forties, the Beats moved to the West Coast. In 1951, Lawrence Ferlinghetti left for San Francisco because "it was the only place where you could get good wine cheap," and opened the City Lights Bookstore, soon to become a Beat hangout. The same year, Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road, a Beat novel about his travels, bumming around the country with Neal Cassady. In 1953, Cassady advised Allan Ginsberg, who was said to have the address of every Beat in the Village in his book, to move to San Fran. Two years later, Ginsberg organized the first public Beat performance, "Six Poets at the Six Gallery", a poetry reading. It was there that he first read his poem "Howl". Two years later, in 1957, Kerouac finally published On The Road. The Beats were living the ideal lifestyle of the avant-garde: complete freedom. What the produced, they did for the movement, and not for any publishing house or record label.