Rebel Who Influenced the World in Their Own Fashion, The Beatniks

    

They were a subculture of rebels who adopted a bohemian lifestyle: sunglasses, berets, leotards, and loose sweaters.  They brought on a new rage in entrepreneurship world, Espresso shops and basement nightclubs. Poetry reading was cool.A peyote vision was the inspiration for the poem Howl in the early 1950s by Allen Ginsberg.  Underrepresented outcasts found a voice and things like drug use; political radicalism and sexuality, including homosexuality, were being discussed in materialistic and conformist USA. The general population was all shook up. Opposition was fierce.  

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed 

by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at

dawn looking for an angry fix,
Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient

heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,”

   Copies of the poem were seized at customs, people were arrested and jailed for selling the poem and a widely publicized obscenity trial in 1957 would judge that the poem was of importance to society.

     From 1958 to 1960, the media was sopped up with news and images of the Beat Generation.World War II was over. The persons behind this  literary movement chose to show their disillusionment through the written word, novels and poems. The world would change on October 4, 1957. The Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite Sputnik. The word beatnik was created by a newspaper columnist in 1958, a play on the word Beat and Sputnik.  In 1960 President J. Edgar Hoover considered Beatniks enemies of the country, along with Communists and Eggheads. Some people did not like them, others tolerated them and yet others imitated them.  

    They give us some new words: like, dig, crazy, cool. For a while, everyday was a field day for the media and the Beatniks were the fodder. Stereotypes developed: the playing of bongo drum and beards. Some saw them as delinquent, some make fun of them.  The beat generation started off having real concerns about things like the atomic bomb and ended up being a societal stereotype but they certainly paved the way for the generation that was to come: the hippies.