“I Want to Be with My Own Kind”: Individual Resistance and Collective Action in the Beat Counterculture

Abstract

In 1959 journalist Paul O’Neil proclaimed that the Beat Generation consisted mostly of “talkers, loafers, passive little con men,” a “bohemian cadre” of “writers who cannot write, painters who cannot paint” (119). Reporter Allen Brown agreed, concluding that the “week-end Bohemians” who came to North Beach looking for a “real, live poet” would be disappointed, because the “serious poets and authors of the Beat Generation are too busy creating to mingle often with the Beatniks” (40–41). Academic observers echoed this distinction between serious artists versus silly beatniks. Sociologist Ned Polsky noted that, of the Beats in Greenwich Village, “at best a sixth are habituated to reading” and “far fewer are concerned with writing” (175). Amidst a mass media frenzy over the Beat Generation, these were the typical sentiments. Most commentators assumed that the true Beats, like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, made literary creativity a focal point of their lives, while the people who flocked to bohemian coffeehouses and jazz clubs in cities throughout America were insignificant. Today scholars, including historians, largely accept these assumptions: They understand the Beat Generation in terms of a literary avant-garde and evaluate its historical significance accordingly.