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A Beat Generation of Post-WWII era and the New Vision
with passion. Without passion, life is impossible, inexplicable, unlivable. We are the beat boys of
the beat society in this beat world. We are the Beat Generation.
was not yet ready to change. Their writing style was spontaneous, free-flowing and composed to
the pace and rhythm of bebop. The long sentences, paced out with the rhythm of breath
(Ginsbergs style of poetry).
They found and preferred a different way to look at things, to feel and understand the world in a
new way, with an alternate consciousness, as if a constant state of trance, a different kind of
filter, through a dream machine.
Beatniks, rejection and popularity
The mainstream society rejected the rogue convention-defying lifestyle and literature of the
Beats. At the same time, their popularity grew among the like-minded underground groups.
Cliques like San Francisco Renaissance, Merry Pranksters (led by Ken Kesey, the author of One
Flew over the Cuckoos Nest) encouraged the use of psychedelic drugs and later formed the link
between the Beat Generation in the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
The term beatnik, after Russia launched the first artificial satellite Sputnik in 1958, was
coined by a San Francisco Chronicle journalist, Herb Caen to condescend the Beats. While the
Sputnik burned up after three months of travel, more than fifty years later, we are still talking
about the Beats. The recent resurgence in popularity of the Beats, with films such as Howl
(2010), On the Road (2012), and Big Sur (2013), and numerous documentaries throughout the
last five decades, are evidence enough that Beat Generation influenced the world in their own
different way. They will forever be remembered as the road junkies of post-World War II era who
travelled across the United States of America in the inky American nights in search of
themselves and gifted their souls to the world with their burning, bleeding words.