The Beat Generation and High Sixties. The role of the Beat culture in the development of American literature.

Beat Generation: A period featuring a group of American poets and novelists of the 1950s and 1960s — including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti — who rejected established social and literary values.

Using such techniques as stream of consciousness writing and jazz-influenced free Verse and focusing on unusual or abnormal states of mind — generated by religious ecstasy or the use of drugs — the Beat writers aimed to create works that were unconventional in both form and subject matter.

Kerouac's On the Road is perhaps the best-known example of a Beat Generation novel, and Ginsberg's Howl is a famous collection of Beat Poetry.

The poetry and fiction of the " Beat Generation ", largely born of a circle of intellects formed in New York City around Columbia University and established more officially some time later in San Francisco, came of age. The term Beat referred, all at the same time, to the countercultural rhythm of the Jazz scene, to a sense of rebellion regarding the conservative stress of post-war society, and to an interest in new forms of spiritual experience through drugs, alcohol, philosophy, and religion, and specifically through Zen Buddhism.

Allen Ginsberg set the tone of the movement in his poem Howl, that began: " I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..." Among the most representative achievements of the Beats in the novel are Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), the chronicle of a soul-searching travel through the continent, and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), a more experimental work structured as a series of vignettes relating, among other things, the narrator's travels and experiments with hard drugs.