Beat Generation (thing)

Beat Generation metawriteup


The East Coast Beats:

William S. Burroughs
• Junky
• Naked Lunch
• The Last Words of Dutch Schultz
• The Western Lands
• Interzone
• The Black Rider
• Spare Ass Annie and other tales
• The Cut-up Technique
Gregory Corso
• "The Mad Yak"
• "Marriage"
Allen Ginsberg
• "America"
• "Anti-Vietnam War Peace Mobilization"
• "Father Death Blues"
• "First Party at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels"
• "Howl"
• "My Alba"
• "On Burroughs' Work"
• "A Supermarket in California"
• "Sunflower Sutra"
• for a complete list see Allen Ginsberg’s poems
Jack Kerouac
• On the Road
• Visions of Cody
• The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
• haikus by Jack Kerouac
• "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose"
• "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose"

Lucien Carr
Neal Cassady
• The First Third
• "The Great Sex Letter"
• The Merry Pranksters
John Clellon Holmes
Herbert Huncke
Carl Solomon


The San Francisco Renaissance:

The Six Gallery poetry reading

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
• City Lights bookstore and publishing
• Pocket Poets series
Bob Kaufman
• "All those ships that never sailed"
• "Heavy Water Blues"
• "I AM A CAMERA"
• "Jazz Chick"
• "O-Jazz-O"
• "On"
• "Round About Midnight"
• "Unhistorical Events"
Philip Lamantia
• "Time Traveler's Potlatch"
Michael McClure
• "For the Death of 100 Whales"
• "Point Lobos: Animism"
• "Watching the Stolen Rose"
Kenneth Rexroth
• "Easy Lessons in Geophagy"
• "Trout"
Gary Snyder
• "Mid-August At Sourdough Mountain Lookout"
• "Pine Tree Tops"
• "Smokey the Bear Sutra"
• "What you should know to be a poet"
Lew Welch
• "The Basic Con"
• "Chicago Poem"
• "Ring of Bone"
Philip Whalen


Fellow travelers:

Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
Charles Bukowski
• Factotum
Diane di Prima
• "April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa"
• Memoirs of a Beatnik
Bob Dylan
• Tarantula
Maurice Girodias
• Olympia Press
Brion Gysin
• The Cut-up Technique
Ken Kesey
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• The Merry Pranksters
Tuli Kupferberg
• 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft
• The Fugs
Frank O’Hara
Peter Orlovsky
Ed Sanders
• Tales of Beatnik Glory
• Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts
• The Fugs
Alexander Trocchi
Alan Watts


Please /msg or e-mail me if there is anyone or any work that I omitted. I have included only works that have already been noded, but I added all the names I could think of, regardless of whether of not bios of them have been noded. The "fellow travellers" are people who are associated with the Beat generation or were heavily influenced by it, but did not belong to one of the two major literary groups in the movement. As far as who to include and who to exclude from that list (which could stretch on for pages with a flexible definition of "association") I generally deferred to Ann Charters’ The Portable Beat Reader , though I did not include every person cited in that book.