culture, setting forth in his essay “The White Negro” (published in Dissent in 1957) an apocalyptic treatise of the white beat hipster as a psychopathic variant of the illiterate black. The novelist Norman Mailer also attempted to define this new vision of U.S. Holmes used the essay to compare his generation to the Lost Generation of World War I and to declare as Beat a post-war generation encompassing the hipster and the radical Republican, both forced to cope with the reality that “the valueless abyss of modern life is unbearable.” He argued that unlike Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein’s generation, the Beat Generation, whether disguised as hip excess or Republican conformity, had had enough of homelessness, valuelessness, and faithlessness, that they were on a spiritual quest. For example, John Clellon Holmes, a friend of Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as well as the author of what is generally considered the first Beat novel ( Go, 1952), wrote an essay titled “This is the Beat Generation” that appeared in The New York Times Magazine in November 1952. Women of the Beat Generation: Conversations with Joyce Johnson and Hettie JonesĮVEN BEFORE THE Beat Generation became a national phenomenon in the wake of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road in 1957, American journalism had begun to explore the concept of “Beat” and philosophize about its possible significance.
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