Toward a “beat generation”

Post-war poets, such as Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke and Howard Nemerov, emphasized traditional form, polish and precision, yet they could be emotional and moving, as some of Roethke’s love poems or Lowell’s personal “confession” poems show. Other poets experimented with new poetic effects.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the leading figures of the San Francisco Renaissance, wrote topical poems specifically to be read aloud in local coffeehouses. By making art a public event, artists like Ferlinghetti hoped to shake middle-class America out of a lifestyle they viewed as self-centered, materialistic and conformist.

The San Francisco writers were also part of a larger group called the “Beat Generation”, a name that referred simultaneously to the rhythm of jazz music, to their sense that society was worn out, and to their interest in new forms of experience, through drugs, alcohol or Eastern mysticism. Poet Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) set for them a tone of social protest and visionary ecstasy, in elaborate language reminiscent of Whitman. Other poets included Gregory Corso (“Gasoline”, 1958) and Gary Snyder (“Riprap”, 1959). Novelist Jack Kerouac, with “On the Road” (1957), celebrated the reckless lifestyle of the Beats. Other Beat-inspired novels included William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” (1959), a hallucinatory look at the subculture of drug addiction, and Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” (1962), an anarchic satire on life in a mental hospital.

While other writers did not espouse the lifestyle of the Beats, they also viewed the world in a comic, absurd light. In J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” (1951), a sardonic teenage boy resists the hypocrisies of adult society. Funny as the novel is, there is something tragic in the boy’s hopelessness about his world. This same combination of wild comedy and despair, often touched with a nightmare surrealism, appeared in novels like John Barth’s “The End of the Road” (1961),

Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49” (1966), John Hawkes’ “The Blood Oranges” (1970), and also in the work of two European emigrants, Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov (“Lolita”, 1951) and Polish-born Jerzy Kosinski (“The Painted Bird”, 1965).

Lecture 10 the 2nd half of the 20th century (2) journalistic approaches

The line between journalism and fiction began to blur in the 1960s, as magazine reporters such as Tom Wolfe (“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”) and Hunter S. Thompson (“Fear and Loathing in Las Vega”) explored the various subcultures developing in America. Both used subjective viewpoints, slang and colloquial rhythms to convey the feeling of these lifestyles. In turn, novelists created “non-fiction novels,” reporting on real incidents using the techniques of fiction: dialogue, descriptive prose and step-by-step dramatic suspense. Truman Capote’s ”In Cold Blood” (1966) told the detailed story of a family murdered on their Midwestern farm; Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song” (1979) was about a social misfit and the path that led him to violent crime and a death sentence.