While the works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs garnered considerable public attention, they were not necessarily the first advocates or practitioners of the artistic philosophy that came to be associated with Beat writers. The notoriety of the Beats—particularly following Ginsberg’s premiere of “Howl” at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco in 1955—in many respects eased the path for other unconventional artists to garner attention. Artists who had been working outside the mainstream saw in the Beats a validation of their own efforts, and as Beat style passed into the mainstream, the audience for other nontraditional artists’s work also grew. Like the Beat writers, contemporary artists in other disciplines—music, theatre, and film—wanted to convey an immediacy of experience, to break out of academic standards of artistic value, and to connect “high” art with the most mundane, unremarkable, and even unappealing aspects of ordinary people’s lives.
Beat writers acknowledged that music was one of their most important influences—particularly the jazz that was played in clubs where white patrons often were not welcome. Beat authors such as Kerouac or Lawrence Ferlinghetti were not necessarily great connoisseurs of jazz, and some later critics have suggested that their celebration of jazz was in part based on their misunderstanding of the art form.
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