Podhoretz detected a suppressed cry of brutality in the Beats , which he summarized as kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.
More on the generation of 58 at New York Times
In fact, he [Jack Kerouac] revised the book [On The Road] many times before it was published six years later, and while the scroll came to symbolise the spontaneity of the Beat Generation, the early, unedited version never reached the public.
Read full article at The Sydney Morning Herald
“He learned English as a second language: his parents were French-Canadian. He also spent some time in the Navy where he was then discharged due to possessing a schizoid personality. Soon after, he became a merchant seaman and then decided on the life of a vagabond, from which he obtained inspiration for his later novels.”
What Jack Kerouac later called that ”mad night” of Oct. 7, 1955, in an erstwhile San Francisco auto-body shop converted to a Boho art gallery. That was the mad night Ginsberg took his turn on the orange-crate podium and declaimed his work in progress to the assembled ”angelheaded hipster” faithful, leaving the throng in an uproar and Beatnik paterfamilias Kenneth Rexroth in tears.
Read full article at The Boston Globe