Search results
People also ask
Who were the Beat Generation?
How did the Beat Generation influence American culture in the 1950s?
What was the Beat movement?
Who influenced the Beat Generation?
May 24, 2024 · Beat movement. American literary and social movement. Also known as: Beat generation. Written and fact-checked by. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s , better known as Beatniks .
In the 1940s and 50s, a new generation of poets rebelled against the conventions of mainstream American life and writing. They became known as the Beat Poets––a name that evokes weariness, down-and-outness, the beat under a piece of music, and beatific spirituality.
The Beat movement was America's first major Cold War literary movement. Originally a small circle of unpublished friends, it later became one of the most significant sources of contemporary counterculture, and the most successful free speech movement in American literature.
May 5, 2019 · To contemporary scholars the term “Beat Generation” refers to a group of post-World War II novelists and poets disenchanted with what they viewed to be an excessively repressive, materialistic, and conformist society, who sought spiritual regeneration through sensual experiences.
May 3, 2004 · These poets would become known as the Beat Generation, a group of writers interested in changing consciousness and defying conventional writing. The Beats were also closely intertwined with poets of the San Francisco Renaissance movement, such as Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan.
The Beat Generation was never a large movement in terms of sheer numbers, but in influence and cultural status they were more visible than any other competing aesthetic. The years immediately after the Second World War saw a wholesale reappraisal of the conventional structures of society.
