Beat Generation
The Beat Generation, or "Beats," is a term used to describe the vanguard of a movement that swept through American culture after World War II as a counterweight to the suburban conformity and organization-man model that dominated the period, especially during the Eisenhower years (1953-1961), when Cold War tension was adding a unparalleled uptightness to American life. The term "Beat Generation" was apparently coined by Jack Kerouac, whose 1957 picaresque novel On the Road is considered a kind of manifesto for the movement. In 1952, John Clellon Holmes wrote in the New York Times Magazine: "It was John Kerouac … who several years ago … said 'You know, this is really a beat generation … More than the feeling of weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw."' Holmes used the term in his 1952 novel Go, with obvious references to New York's bohemian scene. The claim, advanced in some circles, that Kerouac intended "beat" to be related to "beatific" or "beatitude" is now considered spurious by etymologists, though Beatitude was the name of a San Francisco magazine published by poet Allen Ginsberg and others whose folding in 1960 is regarded as the final chapter in that city's Beat movement (generally known as the San Francisco Renaissance).
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