Read the first essay to define the Beats

Jack Kerouac coined the name 'Beat Generation'

The earliest Beats—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady—met in the late 1940s at Columbia University. According to Ginsberg, Kerouac coined the name “Beat Generation” to contrast his peers with the Lost Generation, arguing that what might appear to be disillusionment is actually an openness.

The Beat Generation, explained

The Beat Generation challenged societal norms in the 1950s by embracing experimental writing and tackling taboo topics like drug use, spirituality, and nonconformity. Figures like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Diane di Prima sparked a cultural movement that rejected traditional literary forms and explored the hidden struggles of American life.

The Beat Generation was a 'beaten down', jazz-influenced American literary movement

The movement, which rose to prominence in the 1950s, was primarily composed of poets challenging orthodoxies of post-war American literature and society. Figurehead Allen Ginsberg and his long poem "Howl" represented a rallying cry for a burgeoning counterculture.

Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady were early Beats

Works like Ginsberg’s "Howl" and Kerouac’s "On the Road" redefined literature, inspiring countercultural movements for several decades.

Read the Beats' poetry

The Beats were alike in their willingness to experiment and transgress, though the movement’s writers were distinct artists with varying styles. This collection showcases the breadth of the Beat Generation’s work, with authorized texts from Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, Richard Brautigan and others.

Bebop's freedom inspired the Beat Generation

The jazz style took off in the 1940s, mesmerizing listeners with its wild, improvised solos. It had a particular impact on the writers of the Beat Generation, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who saw in bebop's freedom a model for what they could achieve through the written word. Beat writers like Lawrence Ferlighetti and Kenneth Rexroth even incorporated live jazz in their poetry readings.

The Beats also influenced the imagery of the 1960s

First editions of Burroughs’s "The Naked Lunch," Kerouac’s "The Dharma Bums," and Ferlinghetti’s "A Coney Island of the Mind" were just as notable for their text as they were for their design, which anticipated the psychedelic imagery of 1960s countercultural touchstones like Ken Kesey, Andy Warhol, and R. Crumb.

Beats emphasized the importance of 'spontaneous prose'

Beat writer Jack Kerouac believed literature should aim to be more like jazz, using improvisation to burrow down to the root of the subconscious. In this video from the University of Pennsylvania’s Modern and Contemporary Poetry course, Professor Al Filreis directs a conversation of Kerouac’s manifesto, “Essential of Spontaneous Prose.”

The Beats autobiographical impulse is still influential

The Beats autobiographical approach to literature is seen in contemporary autofiction. While autofiction emerged as a literary term in the 1970s, its philosophy has several antecedents, including Colette’s Claudine novels, Marcel Proust’s "In Search of Lost Time" and Beat writer Jack Kerouac’s "On the Road."

The Beat movement started in San Francisco, but quickly moved beyond it

This documentary features interviews with Beat writers Diane di Prima and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, reflecting on their arrival in San Francisco and the explosion of Beat culture in the city and beyond. “It’s not a generation,” di Prima says, reading one of her verses, “it’s a state of mind.”

Allen Ginsberg on how Walt Whitman changed poetry

In this 1992 appearance on "Charlie Rose," Beat Generation icon Ginsberg articulates why Whitman mattered not only to the Beats but to all of poetry, arguing that he forever changed the possibilities of the form.

How does someone become the ‘voice of a generation’?

From modern authors like Sally Rooney and JD Salinger, to the 19th century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the concept of artists voicing a generation's sentiments goes way back. Read this analysis to understand the concept's history and uncover the potential issues with generalizing a generation's feelings.

A lost Jack Kerouac story was discovered in the belongings of a gunned-down mob boss

The unpublished "The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing" was found in the belongings of Paul Castellano, who was murdered in 1985. It's unclear why Castellano had it, though an heir says it was originally in the collection of a "noted San Francisco-based poet...who received it directly from the author."

Alain Locke's 'The New Negro' anthology helped define the Harlem Renaissance

The 1925 collection of poetry, drama, short fiction, lyrics, and essays by Black writers was intended to document what Locke, a Harvard-trained philosopher and the first Black Rhodes Scholar, believed was a burgeoning Black consciousness that was "vibrant with a new psychology." The book is now considered one of the major impetuses for the Harlem Renaissance.

DJ Kool Herc pioneered the use of breakbeats for hip-hop

Inspired by Jamaican dancehall culture and Manhattan's disco scene, Herc used a new style that used two turntables, seamlessly mixing and looping "breakbeats"—isolated drum breaks from funk, soul, and rock records—that kept dancers at the "back to school jam" moving. Herc's technique would be the basis for modern sampling and hip-hop's first few decades.

Many writers considered 'existentialist' didn't identify with the term

“Existentialism” was first introduced in 1943 by philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir readily adopted the term, but others, such as Albert Camus and Martin Heidegger, rejected it. Earlier philosophers, like Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, were long dead by the time the word was in vogue.

‘The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved’ signaled the birth of Gonzo Journalism

The 1970 essay opens with a crude conversation between Hunter S. Thompson, the author, and a man at an airport bar. Thompson’s first-person account places him as an active participant. Instead of focusing on the race itself, Thompson paints vivid details of his experience with the hedonistic scene surrounding it.

The oft-cited roots of the true crime genre

The 1966 book "In Cold Blood" by American author Truman Capote is often considered the beginning of true crime as it's known today. The story details the real-life murders of a family of four in Holcomb, Kansas, using techniques that, at the time, were relegated to fictional tales. Before it was a book, the narrative was published by The New Yorker in 1965 as a four-part series. 

The first known use of 'punk rock' was in 1971

When Creem Magazine's Dave Marsh wrote about seeing '60s garage rockers ? and the Mysterians perform, he remarked it would be unthinkable "to miss such a landmark exposition of punk-rock." The band isn't considered a punk band, but Marsh's description would go on to define other scrappy, back-to-basics acts.

Scholars debate the meaning behind the first word of 'Beowulf'

Beowulf is an Old English epic poem composed somewhere between the 8th and 11th centuries CE. Its first word, hwæt, is often translated to "what," though scholars debate its specific use in the poem, discussing whether it serves as an exclamation, interjection, or something else entirely.

Critics are still debating 'the great American novel'

The title has been bandied about since the 19th century, though its definition has only become more debated as time goes on. This list catalogs some of the texts critics have argued deserve the crown (like "The Great Gatsby," "To Kill a Mockingbird," and "Invisible Man") and, helpfully, includes those critics’ rationales. Think of it as your new “to read” list—or maybe just something to argue about at your next family gathering.

Some call Beard the original 'foodie'

James Beard came of age when home cooking revolved around canned and frozen ingredients. Likewise, West Coast cuisine wasn’t on anyone’s radar. Beard’s appreciation of fresh, seasonal ingredients and regional influences provided a foundation for today’s movement toward local, farm-to-table cooking and the foodies who seek it out.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats was fascinated by magic and the occult

The Irish poet and 1923 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature laid out his beliefs in a 1901 essay, entitled "Magic," and was a member of several organizations dedicated to occult and mystical practices.

What is transcendentalism?

The 19th-century movement, largely centered around the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson, believed that individuals needed to form transcendent connections with the universe. For many transcendentalist philosophers, writers, and religious figures, that meant seeking it in nature. This Stanford explainer on the philosophy digs deep into its major concepts and figureheads.

He was one of the first writers to cover surfing

For his 1872 travelogue “Roughing It”, Mark Twain visited Hawaii and described a then-peculiar sport: surfing. He even recalls his own attempts to catch a wave, writing, “I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me.”

The word 'jazz' evolved from 'jasm,' 19th-century American slang for 'energy'

Hear 50 years of iconic hip-hop samples, the genre's foundational looped tracks

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, but became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

The Dracula character, now seen as the vampire archetype, was inspired by a seafood-induced nightmare its creator experienced.

While the first exchange-traded fund (a 'basket' of different assets that can be bought and sold on a stock exchange) in the US only launched in 1993, the global ETF market has grown to more than $10T in the short time since.

For centuries, it was common to sleep in two shifts: a few hours at the beginning of the night, and a longer period beginning around midnight

US housing costs have risen by roughly 175% between 1991 and 2026—but a growing number of Gen Zers are becoming homeowners anyway. In 2025, 4% of homebuyers were Gen Z, up from 3% the year before.

The first steps to rebuilding your credit score include getting to know exactly what's on your credit report and figuring out how far you are from the '700 club,' or 'good score' range.