Jack Kerorouac Beat Generation Analysis

Alissa Nasett
English Composition II
Jack Kerouac and The Beatniks: Go On the Road with the Beat Generation.
The end of World War two started the conformity and a conservative mindset in the American people. The majority of young people's goals in life were to marry, move to suburbs, and be financially successful. The beat generation had a different idea, they were a young group of men who were against the "American dream" that the rest of society so strongly desired. These men were Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassidy. They were a group of "struggling writers, students, hustlers, and drug addicts" (Foster 11) better known as the "beats”, and they were the founding fathers of the beat generation.
Jack Kerouac is usually considered the leading pioneer of the beats. Kerouac was born in
Kerouac coined the term the "beat generation" in 1948 when John C. Holmes used it as a description of his social circle. "Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs were new bohemian libertines who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity. Their literature was controversial in its advocacy of non-conformity and non-conforming style" (Foster 76). Allen Ginsberg’s poem "Howl" and William Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" are two important beat writings, and became a focus in American society because of the controversy they brought at the time.
The influences of the beat generation were not only writers, Neal Cassidy, Hal Chase, and Herbert Huncke also inspired it. They created it in a different way, by "providing subject material for writers” (Foster 82). Kerouac has said that Cassidy was his key influence in his spontaneous prose style/technique that he used in On the Road. The beat generation also has roots in Jazz, known as the soundtrack to the beat generation. "What the Beats understood and identified with in jazz, was protest against the white middle-class world" (Foster