The Beat Generation is associated with 1960s USA, a time of counter‐cultural protest and alienation expressing itself in literature, art, and rebellion. Films like The Wild One with Marlon Brando (1951), and books like Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) usually come to mind when the “Beat Generation” is mentioned and studied. There were strong links between such writing and crime fiction of the postwar period, with its preoccupation with the urban jungle and outsiders, and with growing social and literary awareness of juvenile deliquency and the drug culture. Novels like Salingers’ The Catcher in the Rye (1951) remain popular and influential, showing how, at the time, writers wanted to capture fractured, utopian and disillusioned, perceptions of reality, and found suitable vehicles in the dispossessed young of American urban life. The New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Mailer and others, also tried to devise new narrative ways of representing lives both full of hope and full of violence, in a society where the political process lacked credibility, middle‐class liberalism was phoney, and the individual felt powerless in a corporate world.
This is the social and literary framework for Newhouse’s perceptive study of the Beat Generation. He goes outside it for the wider, fuller context, examining postwar culture, and highlighting many writers whose work influenced the Beat Generation and was influenced by it (such as Celine, Genet, Lindner of Rebel without a Cause, Kesey, Gore Vidal, and Trocchi). Of particular value for any reader or library manager wanting to study the period and the “group” systematically, Newhouse (who teaches English at Buffalo State University) identifies the best‐known exemplars of the Beats (like Kerouac and Burroughs) but he also takes time to introduce writers just as important but who may be less well‐known (like Robert Stone, Chandler Brossard, Michael Rumaker, and John Clellon Holmes’ Go of 1952, the first novel to include the term “Beat Generation”).
He indicates just how and why these can be regarded as a group, and why not, puts them in their cultural context, and provides useful critical analyses of their plots and impact. The heyday might have been the 1960s but the critical context and ramifications go much wider, up to today where alienation, subcultures, drugs, gay taboos, and urban pressures exert probably greater pressures on fiction, for adults and for young people. There is a useful chronology covering the years 1902 to 1998, with key and related texts mentioned (a good core list for collectors), and notes with useful sources (O’Brien, Gordon, Fiedler, Dickstein, Tytell, Crowley, and Stephenson, all studies of this period, as well as critical and biographical studies of individual authors). Newhouse provides critical commentary on the works without being pretentious, and, for teachers recommending his book to students, he has a distinctive style easy to pick up if a student plagiarises. A fresh competent study of its field, making me want to read even Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels again to see what I think now. The period is history but the issues live on today.
