American Literature : The Beat Generation

In the 1920’s this gap became more of a chasm as the nation’s youth entered the Jazz age, adopting the new styles of music and dress that accompanied it. Women wore shorter skirts, smoked, drove cars, and sported new haircuts, and men went to new jazz clubs that played edgy music that was good for dancing. Overall the new lifestyle was a complete departure from the Victorian mode of living that preceded it, and it was rejected by the older generation as energetically it was embraced by youth. In the 1950’s a similar change took place as parents allowed their children to have more freedom, and religion was not as strictly enforced. The widespread availability of automobiles allowed teenagers to travel around more than they ever had, and the automobile provided teenagers a new place to be free from the observation of their parents, which enabled many new activities, like petting. Just as the youth of the 1920’s had Jazz music, teenagers in the 50’s began to bother their parents by listening to Rock ‘n’ Roll music, whose stars included the scandalous Elvis Presley and even African-American stars like Little Richard, showing that the music allowed youth to transcend race. Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literature alarmed more conservative Americans with its description of the popular culture of the time, literature during the 50’s was similarly troubling, dealing with themes of

The Sixties were an exciting revolutionary period of time with great social and technological change. Some people called it the “decade of discontent” because of the race riots in Detroit and La, and the demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Other people called it the decade of “peace, love, and harmony”. It was called this because of the peace movement and the emergence of the flower children. (Britannica) The sixties were about assassination, unforgettable fashion, new styles of music, civil rights, gay and women’s liberation, Vietnam, Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, peace marches, sexual freedom, drug experimentation, and Woodstock. All of these components caused a revolutionary change in the world of popular Music.

The “Lost Generation” is essentially a term that is used to describe the young adults of the 1920’s who were changing with the times and rebelling against what America had become after the war. They populated areas like Paris and London where they expected to find literary freedom and a cosmopolitan way of life. The “Lost Generation" of American writers and poets left America, seeking refuge from the broken culture and devastation that had come from the war, and ended up in Paris, a city that had a thriving art culture where they could write freely and lavish in the Bohemian lifestyle without rules. They drank, traveled, had love affairs, and wrote. They were influenced by the paintings of artists like Dada and Picasso and collected their works, as well as socialized with them. They critiqued each other’s writing and often met in bookstores, cafés, and bars to talk about their works and life in general. They had mostly upper-middle-class upbringings and were sustained in hard times by their parents' fortunes. They chose to come to Paris to seek artistic fulfillment and ended up writing what is possibly considered some of the best fiction of the 20th century. It was the time when writers, painters, musicians, and composers went to Paris to work and

Literature is the window to realizing the negatives of society and how destructive certain norms can be. Readers are brought into a completely different story than their own, but by using similar issues in today’s world, the readers can actually learn from the story and its overall message. All writers write for a purpose, whether it’s for a new meaning to life, to live a different life than our own, or to impact others on an emotional level by teaching them to see the importance of the little things. As a reader, you search for pieces of literature that interest you whether you find the story like your own, or wish you lived the life in the story. By using issues in today’s within their works, authors are able to grab the reader's attention long enough for them to get across what they wanted to get across. Often in many works of literature, writers use societal issues as their basis for the work’s themes and symbols. By doing so, this allows the reader to question the morality behind social norms and how impactful certain ideals can be in people’s lives.

As the 1950’s rolled along and the 1960’s came into effect, the world was thrown into a topspin that would soon define every generation of youths. As the trends changed and the music got more complex a deeper metamorphosis was taking place inside every city and every person. To develop a counterculture in the 1960’s there had to be new ideas circulating that were counter-norm. These ideas were not developed right away for any one reason, though. Just like the times, the causes for this counter-culture were far more complex than anyone had seen before in the 20th century. Some could say it was because of a civil rights call or say it was because of the drugs, but I just don’t know

Throughout history, there have been many great writers. Those writers used the world around them and a bit of their own style to influence their works. The 1960s was one of the most turbulent decades in U.S. history and new styles of writing were being discovered. A curious Truman Capote used his style of new journalism, events that took place in the late 1950s and the 1960s, and the novel In Cold Blood to change the face of literature for years to come.

John Lennon of the famous rock band, The Beatles, once said, “If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace”. This quote essentially defines the 1960s and the counterculture movement in America. After WWII people had much more free time than they did during the war, and many people decided that they wanted to settle down and start a family. This caused a large boom in child birth. The children born during this boom are known as “baby-boomers”. “Due to the baby boom between 1945 and 1955, over half the population was under 30 years old” (The American Experience 1). During this time in American history, the children of the “baby boomer” generation started rebelling against the war in Vietnam and the

Three key events that can be related to the dramatic change in views towards societal mores is the ‘Beat Movement’, the Nuclear Arms race and increased college enrolment. Firstly, the ‘Beat Movement’ was a movement during the 1950s that was initial conspired by writers and artist of the time and criticized American society’s values of “conformity over independence and financial gain over spiritual and social advancement,” (). Alongside these voiced opinions against society a new recurring uneasiness towards the future was being shared amongst the youth as American Government raced against Russia in the Nuclear Arms Race. Finally, a newly favoured sense of freedom and independence occurred as an increase in college enrolment created an environment in which the baby boomers shared similar fears and feelings towards society and its future. These three key events alongside advance in media and events such as the Tet Offense (Vietnam War) and release of the Pentagon papers allowed for people to begin question the government especially “by the end of the decade… [as] Americans… lost much of their innocence and optimism…. The escalating Vietnam War, which was taking the lives of thousands of American soldiers and countless Vietnamese every

The Nineteen Sixties were a time of grand turmoil in the United States. The nation almost came apart at the seams many times throughout the decade. The government was involved in a plethora of things at the time that the general population did not agree with. The most important was the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was the most publicly protested war in the history of the country. There were many new forms of protesting used at this time. The most mainstream and effective way of protest was through song. The lyrics of the songs of the sixties were laced with anti-government and anti-war messages that were sometimes hidden and sometimes direct. The generation responsible for the new music was the Baby Boomers. These were the

The Hippie Movement changed the politics and the culture in America in the 1960s. When the nineteen fifties turned into the nineteen sixties, not much had changed, people were still extremely patriotic, the society of America seemed to work together, and the youth of America did not have much to worry about, except for how fast their car went or what kind of outfit they should wear to the Prom. After 1963, things started to slowly change in how America viewed its politics, culture, and social beliefs, and the group that was in charge of this change seemed to be the youth of America. The Civil Rights Movement, President Kennedy’s death, new music, the birth control pill, the growing illegal drug market, and

The turbulent societal changes of the mid-20th Century have been documented in countless forms of literature, film and art. On the Road by Jack Kerouac was written and published at the outset of the counter-culture movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This novel provides a first-hand account of the beginnings of the Beat movement and acts as a harbinger for the major societal changes that would occur in the United States throughout the next two decades. On the contrary, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a Hunter S. Thompson novel written in 1971 provides a commentary on American society at the end of the counter-culture movement. Thompson reflects on the whirlwind of political and social activism he experienced and how American society had

To understand the sixties counterculture, we must understand the important role of Bob Dylan. His lyrics fueled the rebellious youth in America. Songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times are A-Changin” made him favorable to anti-war demonstrators and supporters of the Civil Rights movement. He was commonly hailed as the spokesman for his generation. Dylan used lyrics to allow the youth to find their own form of counter-culture. The youth generation began to see the effects racism, war, etc. effect the society in America. To combat this, the youth created their own form of counter-culture to promote a peaceful change within society. Some of their actions include forming anti-war protests that opposed America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and supporting African Americans/women get the rights they deserve through the Civil Rights Movement. Bob Dylan’s music appealed to the young generation because he openly expresses his disapproval of the establishment in order to influenced his audience to move in a direction for change. Counterculture youth rejected cultural norms of the previous generation and their values and lifestyles opposed the mainstream culture present in the 1950’s. The folk music revival of the early 1960s, as well as the counter-culture movement played an important role in advocating change. Bob Dylan wrote songs that influenced the Civil Rights Movement, New Left Movement, and Anti-War Movement.

The beatnik population grew increasingly throughout the years and became once again, what everyone else was doing. The movement was something that people saw as extreme, but the beatniks’ actions, whether it was intentional or not, were the stepping stones into a different view on society. People were starting to question the

During the sixties, there was a huge generation gap between the parents, who became adults around World War II, and the children, baby-boomers, who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. Due to the generation gap, the younger generation grew farther apart from their parents and the older age group. The younger people believed that the older generation was too inhibited and too materialistic. For the most part, the baby boomers simply refused to accept the world-view of the older generation without questioning it. They broke with the political persuasions of their

Jack Kerouac was one of a group of young men who, immediately after the Second World War, protested against what they saw as the blandness, conformity and lack of cultural purpose of middle-class life in America. The priorities of people of their age, in the mainstream of society, were to get married, to move the suburbs, to have children and to accumulate wealth and possessions. Jack Kerouac and his friends consciously rejected this pursuit of stability and instead looked elsewhere for personal fulfillment. They were the Beats, the pioneers of a counterculture that came to be known as the Beat Generation. The Beats saw mainstream life as a prison. They wanted freedom, the freedom to pick up and go at a moments notice. This search for