The Beat writers faced a significant obstacle to publication: their lifestyle and the writing that reflected it flew in the face of convention and thus distanced them from the conservative publishing establishment. Writers frustrated by the lack of acceptance by larger publishers created their own underground or “little” magazines and small presses. For many writers of the Beat era, publication in magazines such as Robert Creeley’s Black Mountain Review, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Neon magazine, or LeRoi Jones’s Yugen was the first appearance of their work in print. The major small presses devoted to publishing works by these writers were City Lights (started by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights bookstore), Grove Press (purchased in 1951 by Barney J. Rosset, Jr.), and New Directions (started by James Laughlin).
The Beat Generation saw the resurrection of an earlier Bohemian spirit defined, on the one hand, by a suspicion of wealth and social position as delineators of worth, and, on the other, by an affirmation of the value of ideas and emotions, especially as expressed in artistic form. According to Sorrentino, the magazines catering to the Beat writers did not serve as catch-all publications for those who simply “wished to express themselves,” but instead had “a definite literary bone to pick, and…set themselves up not as mere alternative press but as a press that considered its criteria to be correct.”
The Beats were not the first group of writers to depend on small literary presses.
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