Word: kerouac
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Twain and illegitimate sons of Hemingway who have come to confuse the simple sentence with literature and the monosyllable with wisdom--the crude words and rugged realism of men's magazines and college sophomores. This species of literature is dying along with the subconscious-childhood reverie. The new: Jack Kerouac's bastardization of the picar-esque tradition, the hipster vocabulary, the mystic meaningless words attached to a generation, where motion is meaning and stasis is death. (I do not speak here of the book clubs, circulating libraries, paperbounds, and imported brown-covered erotica; Henry Miller and Herman Wouk bestride this...
...tell you about Harold, the red-eyed bowtied young man mentioned earlier. Harold was tossed out of Adams House two weeks before Summer School. He is writing his thesis on Jack Kerouac. He wanders down Massachusetts Avenue in the infant hours with that burdened shuffle of troubled genius. He is typical of the night-crawlers, repressed, rebellious, and vaguely disturbed...
...Producer Gene Feldman, 37, and Literary Agent Max Gartenberg, 32, is that it answers this question better collectively than any one of the semi-articulate Beats and Angries has done on his own. The editors have culled the best from both schools (the U.S.'s Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Clellon Holmes; Britain's Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Osborne) and leavened the lot with sharp-eyed critical commentaries from both sides of the water. U.S. readers will find the Beat section more interesting, if only because it helps to illuminate such postwar phenomena as the James Dean cult...
Even when he is not being bitten by foam-teeth, the hipster is a chronic manic-depressive ("Crazy, man!"; "Everything drags me now"). A kind of urban waif in the asphalt jungle, he regularly tastes despair, or what Kerouac calls "the pit and prunejuice of poor beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man." Sometimes he "flips," i.e., goes mad. Allen Ginsberg, 32, the discount-house Whitman of the Beat Generation, begins his dithyrambic poem Howl (which the New York Times's Critic J. Donald Adams has suggested should be retitled Bleat) with the lines...
...good mind is hard to find among the Beats, but the leading theoreticians of hipdom are probably Jack Kerouac and Clellon (Go) Holmes. Each insists that the Beat Generation is on a mystic search for God. To be beat, argues Holmes in a recent Esquire, is to be "at the bottom of your personality looking up." Says Kerouac: "I want God to show me His face." This might be more convincing if Kerouac's novels did not play devil's advocate by preaching, in effect, "Seek ye first the Kingdom of kicks," e.g., drink, drugs, jazz and chicks...