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Following an overview of canonical Beat Generation artists such as Kerouac and Ginsberg, this chapter examines the status of women writers in the 1950s and a close reading of James Baldwin’s Another Country.

Less than a month after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, John Clellon Holmes finished his new jazz novel, titled The Horn. By this time, he and Kerouac were already the object of strong media interest in connection with the Beat phenomenon, and also began to reap some of its more obvious rewards. Holmes was offered by Esquire much more money than he used to receive to write an essay explaining the Beat Generation to the magazine’s upscale readers, while Kerouac was busy talking to interviewers to answer the same questions. The “Beat frenzy” sweeping over the two novelists had surfaced at a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955, with Allen Ginsberg reading the first part of Howl. There were efforts to belittle the Beats, including that of journalist Herb Caen, who coined the word “Beatnik” in his San Francisco Chronicle column on April 2, 1958.

This comprehensive essay presents a history of Beat literature, its reception in and out of academia, suggestions for contemporary approaches to teaching Beat literature in multidisciplinary contexts, and an outline of the contents of the volume.

Furie writes a personal script for the CBC to produce, based on an elopement misadventure he experienced during college. Not permitted to direct his script, Furie readapts it into his first feature film, A Dangerous Age (1957), made against all odds in a Toronto that was in no way hospitable to having an independent feature film shot there. He sells the film to the British market as his wife delivers a son and announces another baby on the way. Though he fails to get the film seen in Canada, he follows up with a second feature, A Cool Sound from Hell (1959), starring Anthony “Tony” Ray (the son of director Nicholas), another semi-autobiographical story, about the Beat scene in Toronto. Tony Ray jetted between Furie’s film in Toronto and John Cassavetes’s Shadows (1959), shooting simultaneously in New York. Furie sells the film, once again, to the British market, and emigrates there with his new family in January 1960.

This chapter commences with an overview of conservative representations of the 1950s and of the sociological studies that emerged to identify discontent at the time. It contains particular focus on Paul Goodman and Betty Friedan, before examining the roots of the counterculture in American Transcendentalism, Civil Rights and the European avant garde.

When Go was finally published, it did not get the attention John Clellon Holmes had expected. On October 12, 1952, Go received its first long review courtesy of the New York Herald Tribune, although it was generally a negative one. The most significant, albeit also negative, review was written by Gilbert Milstein on November 9, 1952 for the New York Times. Titled “The ’Kick’ That Failed,” the article was a forerunner of the hostile media storm that hounded the writers of the Beat Generation. Meanwhile, Kerouac traveled to Mexico City and stayed at William Burroughs’ apartment. From there, he wrote Allen Ginsberg on May 17, 1952, informing him that he had just mailed the new “sketching” version of On the Road, now titled Visions of Cody, to their friend Carl Solomon, an editor at Ace Books. That June, Kerouac wrote to Holmes to discuss the jazz novels they each planned to write. Holmes continued to write and rewrite the first chapters of his sequel to Go, giving it the title Perfect Fools.

After meeting Jay Landesman, Gershon Legman, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg—all of whom would profoundly change his life—on the Fourth of July weekend in 1948, John Clellon Holmes admitted that he felt like a different person. In August of that year he encountered Kerouac a second time at Alan Harrington’s home, along with Edward Stringham. Kerouac and Holmes became close friends almost immediately. Kerouac let Holmes read the manuscript of the novel he was writing, The Town and the City. Meanwhile, Holmes again found himself in trouble with his novel. He also found himself disillusioned with Communism as a political system, and supported the campaign of Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party in the presidential election against Harry Truman. However, Wallace lost the support of the labor unions, leading to his defeat in the polls. Throughout the fall of 1948 Holmes persisted with the writing of his almost-finished novel and his poetry. One night, he cajoled Kerouac into finding some term that would define their group. Kerouac replied, half seriously, that they were a “Beat Generation.”

As Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes continued to receive attention for their novels, On the Road and The Horn, respectively, each found himself spinning out of control over the next few years. In October 1958 Holmes’s father suffered a heart attack, and Holmes traveled to Washington to be with him. It was during their bedside talks that Holmes finally became reconciled with his father. When his father died a few weeks after entering the Veteran’s Hospital, Holmes began writing a poem titled “Too-Late Words for My Father,” which was completed only in 1973. Meanwhile, he and Kerouac had to endure many interviews and appearances in relation to the Beat Generation. In November, Kerouac appeared on a national television show in Hollywood with the comedian and pianist Steve Allen, reading passages from On the Road and the still unpublished Visions of Cody. When the first serious academic anthology/textbook that tackled the Beat Generation, A Casebook on the Beat, by Thomas Parkinson, was published, Holmes found that he was not in it.

This chapter puts the Beat writer Jack Kerouac in conversation with 1950s sociologists and psychologists interested in juvenile delinquency. These social scientists used the delinquent to develop ideas that would culminate in the class culture paradigm of the 1960s. Kerouac’s fiction prefigures this paradigm, drawing on the work of Oswald Spengler to distinguish between lower-class minority and middle-class white cultures in the United States. In autobiographical novels like Maggie Cassidy, On the Road, and Dr. Sax, Kerouac imagines the delinquent as a self-divided figure, alienated from the traditional lower class and unable to adapt to the new demands of the rising professional class. His version of process art replicates this division, offering its readers a failed synthesis of middlebrow and avant-garde literature.

After his book Nothing More to Declare was rejected by Viking in the late autumn of 1965, John Clellon Holmes traveled to Fayetteville to spend a semester of what he termed “gypsy-teaching” at the University of Arkansas. He had been hired for the spring semester as a Writer-In-Residence in a trial Master of the Arts program in creative writing at the university. When the semester was over, Holmes and his wife Shirley returned to Old Saybrook. In July E. P. Dutton & Company agreed to publish Nothing More to Declare. Holmes then turned to his old manuscript of Perfect Fools, while his friend Jack Kerouac was struggling as his works continued to receive dismissive reviews. By the mid-1960s, however, readers would finally learn to appreciate Kerouac’s books, which began to sell in the tens of thousands in paperback editions both in the United States and abroad. The market was soon flooded with small press books by poets and novelists associated with the Beat Generation. The Beats underwent a transformation, first into Beatniks and then into hippies.

In the summer of 1982, Allen Ginsberg arranged a ten-day conference in Boulder, Colorado to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. It was also a celebration of the Beat Generation and their accomplishments. It was at the Naropa Institute in Boulder that Ginsberg and Anne Waldman had established their center for Beat studies, which they named the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Ginsberg invited filmmaker and friend Robert Frank to document the gatherings on the porch. Among those in attendance were John Clellon Holmes, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, Herbert Huncke, Diane di Prima, Carl Solomon, Carolyn Cassady, William Burroughs, and Ken Kesey. Holmes, who described the conference in his essay “Envoi in Boulder,” had undergone aggressive surgery for the cancer in his mouth and jaw. On July 15, 1986, he revealed that his cancer had returned. Despite his terminal illness, Holmes was still able to produce three collections of essays for the University of Arkansas Press even as he continued to write poetry.

It was 1948 when John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac met for the first time as young, would-be writers. After that, they remained friends for the rest of their lives. Born on the same day, March 12, four years apart, Holmes and Kerouac were “brother-souls.” Sharing a New England background, they dreamed of becoming the most important novelists of twentieth-century America, at a time when the writing of the “great American novel” was still the goal of every aspiring author. Amid arguments in New York City in the early years of their friendship, and what seemed like an unattainable goal, Holmes and Kerouac wrote their next novels together. Kerouac published a novel first in 1950, followed by Holmes two years later with Go. In the fall of 1948, Kerouac proposed the term “Beat Generation” to describe their group and published the novel On the Road in 1957. Almost everyone who crowds the pages of Go and On the Road became a familiar figure to the intensely curious readers of the books.

The Horn is John Clellon Holmes’s brilliant, troubling testament to jazz. Loosely based on the lives and careers of jazz musicians Holmes admired, the book employs the narrative structure of tragic drama, which is defined by the Aristotelian rules of unity of action. Although it drifts between a number of musicians’ apartments and Harlem bars, The Horn is essentially set within the same scene, as proposed by Aristotle. In June 1977, Holmes discussed his specific aims in the novel with the young academic Tim Hunt. A month later, he wrote to Richard K. Ardinger, who had become interested in the Beat Generation as a student and was compiling Holmes’s bibliography, to talk about the conception of the novel. Two of the characters in The Horn are Jack Kerouac and Holmes himself. At its release, the novel received mostly moderate reviews from the mainstream press, but was acclaimed by knowledgeable critics with a close connection with jazz, such as Ralph Gleason in San Francisco and Studs Terkel in Chicago.

As he continued his battle with cancer, John Clellon Holmes wrote letters expressing his concern about the collected volume of Jack Kerouac’s writing that he still hoped he and Ann Danberg could edit together for the Viking Portable Library series. During this time, his wife Shirley discovered that she herself was afflicted with lung cancer. Holmes remained in touch with Richard and Rosemary Ardinger, who continued to work on the new collection of his poetry for their Limberlost Press. In one of his letters dated June 23, 1987, Holmes answered three literary questions: about the form of his novel Go, about the ideas inherited by the Beat Generation from the literary American Renaissance, and about the source of the yearnings of his own character “Paul Hobbes” in Go. On March 30, 1988, Holmes finally succumbed to cancer of the jaw and died in the Yale-New Haven Hospital at the age of sixty-two. Less than two weeks later, Shirley passed away. One of Holmes’s final poems, “Sweet Charity,” was published a year after his death.

While they never lost their sense of their New England roots, John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac made New York City their scene for twenty years. Each came to New York as teenagers, with Kerouac arriving first. Kerouac came to the city as a football player on a scholarship, enrolling at Lowell High School as a sophomore in 1936. Four years later, he entered Columbia University, where he broke his leg while playing for the football team. World War II brought many changes to the lives of Holmes and Kerouac. In the fall of 1942, Kerouac met Edie Parker, a girl who was romantically involved with his friend Henri Cru at the time. Kerouac soon began an affair with Parker. The earliest loose confederation of what would be called “the Beat Generation” met in the apartment that Parker and her friend Joan Vollmer Adams rented together.

Chapter 1 examines the circumstances surrounding the production of Frank’s first completed film, Pull My Daisy (1959). Loosely based on the third act of Kerouac’s unproduced play Beat Generation, the film was shot in the apartment of Alfred Leslie, a painter and friend of Frank’s who also served as the film’s co-director. Drawn from the New York literary and art scenes, the cast features the poets Ginsberg, Corso and Peter Orlovsky and the painters Larry Rivers and Alice Neel.

This chapter explores how Walter Salles’ Diarios de motocicleta and On the Road use road movie conventions to forward their political agendas. It establishes the interconnectedness of the near contemporaneous journeys recounted in the two films by Cuban revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and author of the seminal novel On the Road (1957) Jack Kerouac and how these are linked to the genesis of the road movie genre. It goes on to analyse how both films use the political strategies of the road movie (rebellion) to (re)explore and update the beginnings of the interconnected social, cultural and political revolutions (the Cuban Revolution, the Beat Generation and their links to the counter culture in the United States). In keeping with the broader aims of the book, this chapter is also about defending the political potential of the genre film and how it is used to address rather than ‘gloss over’ the political history of the continent.