Word: kerouac
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Naming generations is a tricky project. Jack Kerouac was successful in naming his Beat Generation, but few others have been able to give their own generation a lasting moniker. The Baby Boomers—our parents—were given their name before they had done much more than arrive. The Greatest Generation—our grandparents—only got that label decades after they had earned it. Some have tried to call our generation a “Lost Generation,” echoing Gertrude Stein, who coined the term in reference to the original Lost Generation...
...taking LSD,” wrote Extension School instructor John McMillian in an email; he is currently working on a book about the legendary band. “Same for Bob Dylan. And I can think of several major writers, like Edgar Allen Poe, Aldous Huxley and Jack Kerouac, whose use of narcotics, hallucinogens and stimulants apparently enhanced their work. But certainly there was a destructive side to this as well. Diminishing returns set in pretty quickly, and several of the people I just mentioned ended up suffering mightily because of their use of drugs. This may well...
...Hipsters were usually middle-class white youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely-black jazz musicians they followed. But the subculture grew, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene attached itself to the movement: Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg were early hipsters, but it would be Norman Mailer who would try and give the movement definition. In an essay titled "The White Negro," Mailer painted hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death - annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity - and electing instead to "divorce oneself from society, to exist without...
...about sexual boundaries and the ways in which straight men, even enlightened ones, recoil at the thought of gay sex (male, that is), but they are just as much about the limits of adult friendships and the boxes we often put our oldest friends in. "You're not as Kerouac as you think you are, and I'm not as white picket fence as you think I am," Ben tells Andrew...
Nicosia is the author of Memory Babe, a Jack Kerouac biography