Introduction

Abstract

The Beats were an avant-garde arts movement and bohemian subculture that led an underground existence in the 1940s and early 1950s, gaining public recognition in the late 1950s with the publication of Howl (Allen Ginsberg 1956), On the Road (Jack Kerouac 1957), Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs 1959), and The New American Poetry (Donald Allen ed. 1960). Publication was also accompanied by the notoriety of censorship trials for Howl (San Francisco, 1956) and Naked Lunch (Boston, 1962), and later for Lenore Kandel’s The Love Book (San Francisco, 1966) and Michael McClure’s The Beard (Berkeley, 1967), as well as police raids on Beat cafes and bars in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Although influential in many artistic circles and bohemian enclaves and celebrated in the burgeoning youth culture, these writers and many other less famous Beats were condemned and ridiculed by mass media journalists, the then-reigning public intellectuals, and by academic critics. Thus, very little serious criticism appeared in the 1960s and ’70s, and the Beats were largely excluded from academic discourse.