ENGL 1201W Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Beat Generation
Document Summary
Born to a russian-jewish immigrant family in new jersey, his early life was marked by his mother"s struggle with mental illness as well as her leftist activism. At colombia university, he met jack kerouac and william s. burroughs, who would later be influential in the beat movement, and began experimenting with drugs. He moved to san francisco in 1954; when howl was published in 1955, the publisher was arrested and went on trial for obscenity; testimony from writers and critics convinced the judge the poem was not obscene. He was involved in the protest movements of the 1960s and stood for anti-war, populist, and libertarian (especially sexual) causes, as well as becoming more involved with buddhism. Influences: hebrew prophets, christian/islamic mysticism, and buddhism/hinduism in religion; the. Marxist and anarchist political traditions; the modern literary tradition of visionary or ecstatic poetry, especially william blake and walt whitman. Counterculture: a term coined in 1960 by john milton.
