A Cultural Chronology of Early Beat Generation Literature

1944

Broadway: Harvey, I Remember Mama

Films: Double Indemnity, Gaslight

Music: Swing is in vogue - Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Woody Herman, Tommy Dorsey

Art: Edward Hopper, Clyfford Still

Fiction: John Hershey's A Bell for Adano

Poetry: Pulitzer to Karl Shapiro's V- Letter and Other Poems

Kenneth Rexroth engineers Berkeley Renaissance with William Everson, Philip Lamantia, Robert Duncan... Circle magazine around West Coast Anarchist and Libertarian Circles around Berkeley.

European Surrealists in New York City during the war meet with American artists and writers.

First meeting of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Herbert Huncke in New York City, around Columbia University and Times Square. Kerouac marries Edie Parker while held in jail as a material witness in friend Lucien Carr's murder trial (marriage lasts a few months). Kerouac and Burroughs write novel together "And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks."

Broadway: Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie and He Touched Me

Films: The Lost Weekend, Mildred Pierce, The Body Snatcher

Music: Be-Bop jazz evolves with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

Art: Abstract Expressionist art is thriving throughout the Beat Era with such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, William de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns, many of whom gathered in the Greenwich Village scene with writers.

At Columbia University, Allen Ginsberg is expelled for harboring Jack Kerouac in his room and for writing offensive protest words on his dormitory-room window.

Dr. Benjamin Spock's The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care is published; advent of television use of commercial jet airlines; popularization of Jean Paul Sartre's existentialism. German Nazi's are sentenced to death at Nuremburg trials.

Broadway: O'Neil's The Iceman Cometh, Hellman's Another Part of the Forest, and Born Yesterday

Films: The Best Years of Our Lives treating dissatisfied war veterans wins Academy Award as best picture. Bogart in The Big Sleep

Fiction: Carson McCullers' A Member of the Wedding, Camus' The Stranger, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men

Poetry: Pulitzer to Robert Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle

William S. Burroughs and common-law wife Joan Vollmer move to Texas with their daughter; Neal Cassady meets Kerouac and Ginsberg in New York City; Kerouac begins writing The Town and the City after the death of his father.

Broadway: Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire

Film: Gentleman's Agreement Miracle on 34th Street

Music: Top jazz performances by Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington Band, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra

Fiction: Schulberg's The Harder They Fall, Michener's Tales of the South Pacific

Poetry: Pulitzer Prize to W.H. Auden's Age of Anxiety.

Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Cassady live in Denver for summer; Cassady meets future wife Carolyn Robinson; Ginsberg and Cassady visit Burroughs in Texas.

Broadway: Mr. Roberts, Anne of the Thousand Days

Films: The Red Shoes, Key Largo, Sorry, Wrong Number

Televison: Popular programs: "Douglas Edwards and the News,"

"Candid Camera," "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts," "Milton Berle Show," "Studio One,"

"Philco Television Playhouse"

Music: Stan Kenton appears at Hollywood Bowl

Art: Andrew Wyeth, Ben Shahn, Arshile Gorky

Fiction-The Plague by Albert Camus, The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer.

John Clellon Holmes meets Kerouac and Ginsberg in New York City around Columbia University where Ginsberg has re-enrolled and graduates. Ginsberg begins his series of William Blake visions. Kerouac and Cassady take first on the road trip together.

Broadway: Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

Films: Pinky, Home of the Brave, Sands of Iwo Jima

Television: "The Goldbergs," "Captain Video and the Video Rangers" "Mama"

Music: "Cool Jazz" of Mile Davis, Jerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck; Billie Eckstine is popular singer

Fiction: Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm, George Orwell's 1984

Ginsberg is arrested in NYC for harboring stolen goods from Huncke and sent to New York State Psychiatric Institute for 8 months where he meets Carl Solomon, fellow patient and hero of "Howl" poem. Ginsberg visits William Carlos Williams. Burroughs in Mexico City.

Broadway: Come Back, Little Sheba, The Cocktail Party

Films: All about Eve, The Asphalt Jungle Sunset Boulevard

Television: "You Bet Your Life"(Groucho Marx), "Your Hit Parade"

Music: Big Bands giving way to smaller groups-George Shearing, Count Basie.

Fiction: Faulkner's Collected Stories, Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles

Poetry: Pulitzer to Carl Sandburg's Complete Poems; books by Howard Nemerov, Delmore Schwartz, William Carlos Williams' Collecter Later Poems

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, then Kenneth Patchen move to San Francisco; Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, and Philip Whalen at Reed College in Portland, Oregon; Rexroth conducting weekly soiree in San Francisco home; KPFA, Pacifica Foundation, first public radio, in Berkeley; Burroughs is writing novel Junkie. Kerouac's The Town & the City (Harcourt, Brace) treats life in working class Lowell, Mass. and New York City. He marries Joan Haverty for six months; travels to Denver then to Mexico to visit with Cassady to visit Burroughs.

Broadway: The Rose Tattoo, The Moon Is Blue

Films: An American in Paris, A Place in the Sun

Television: "Your Show of Shows" with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca; Kefauver crime hearings.

Music: Jazz figures: Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Maynard Ferguson

Fiction: J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.

Poetry: Pulitzer to Marianne Moore's Collected Poems; books by Adrienne Rich, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke

Ginsberg and Kerouac meet Gregory Corso in New York City; Kerouac writes initial draft of On the Road in three weeks, becomes interested in Buddhism; Burroughs accidentally shoots and kills his wife, Joan.

Broadway: The Seven Year Itch

Films: High Noon, Viva Zapata!, Come Back, Little Sheba;first Cinemascope and Cinerama films

Television: "The Jackie Gleason Show," "Ernie Kovacs Show"

Music: Louis Armstrong tours Europe with his All Stars

Fiction: Pulitzer to Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Steinbeck's East of Eden

Poetry: Pulitzer to Archibald MacLeish's Collected Poems 1917-1952; Dylan Thomas doing U.S. reading tour - NYC, San Francisco, etc.

Kerouac completes Visions of Cody, lives with Neal and Carolyn Cassady in San Francisco, writes Dr. Sax while living with Burroughs in Mexico, visited by Cassady.

Go first Beat Generation novel by John Clellon Holmes who writes "This Is the Beat Generation" for New York Times; germination of New York Poets group-Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest.

Broadway: The Crucible, Picnic, Camino Real

Films: From Here to Eternity, The Big Heat

Music: Vocalists-Ella Fitzgerald, Nat "King" Cole, Four Freshmen

Fiction: James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Saul Bellows' The Adventures of Augie March

Poetry: Pulitzer to Theodore Roethke for The Waking; books by Richard Eberhart, May Sarton

Gary Snyder working at Sourdough Mountain meets Kenneth Rexroth, then enters Berkeley as a graduate student; City Lights Bookstore founded by Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin, begins publishing City Lights Magazine;Burroughs' novel Junkie is published by Ace Books; Kerouac writes Maggie Cassidy and The Subterraneans in NYC where he reunites with Burroughs and Ginsberg who are editing their correspondence as The Yage Letters.

Broadway: The Bad Seed, Witness for the Prosecution,

Films: On the Waterfront, The Caine Mutiny, The Wild One

Fiction: Golding's Lord of the Flies

Television: Army-McCarthy hearings, "Davey Crockett" episodes on "Disneyland" program; "I Love Lucy"

Radio: Popular disc jockey Alan Freed coins term for new music as "rock 'n' roll"

Allen Ginsberg arrives in San Francisco, working in market research, meets Peter Orlovsky; North Beach bohemian scene at cafe's, bars, jazz clubs- - includes writers Jack Spicer, Richard Brautigan, Bob Kaufman, John Weiners, Bay Area Poets Coalition; Weldon Kees and Dick Martin organize first SF Poets Follies; Black Mountain College fosters projective verse through poets Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, et al.

Broadway: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Bus Stop, The Diary of Anne Frank, A View from the Bridge

Films: Rebel without a Cause, The Blackboard Jungle, Marty, The Rose Tattoo

Televison: first presidential press conference is broadcast; "64,000 Question"

Art: "Pop Art" of Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, et al-Morris Graves, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers

Fiction: McCarthy's A Charmed Life, Mailer's The Deer Park

Poetry: Pulitzer to Elizabeth Bishop's Poems: North and South- - A Cold Spring

Ginsberg organizes Six Gallery Reading in San Francisco garage- gallery, featuring: Rexroth as MC, poets: Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder and Ginsberg's own reading of Howl, Kerouac cheering them on (Oct. 13); McClure completes studies at San Francisco State College; Ferlinghetti launches City Lights Books with Pocket Poets Series: #1, his own Pictures of a Gone World, #2 Rexroth's 30 Spanish Poems, Patchen's Poems of Humor and Protest; Kerouac writes Mexico City Blues, befriends Gary Snyder at Berkeley, who is translating Chinese poetry of Zen poet Han- Shan; he and Kerouac go mountain climbing, discuss Buddhism; Kerouac returns briefly to North Carolina, writes "Jazz of the Beat Generation" for New World Writing; Corso's The Vestal Lady on Brattle is published with support of friends at Harvard.

Broadway: Beckett's Waiting for Godot with Bert Lahr and E.G. Marshall; Chayefsky's Middle of the Night

Films: Giant, Lust for Life, The Ten Commandments, Baby Doll, The Seventh Seal

Television: Elvis Presley's appearance on Ed Sullivan Show starts protest; daytime soap operas; late night Steve Allen Show; "Playhouse 90" produces "Requiem for a Heavy-weight"; "Alfred Hitchcock Presents"

Music: Harry Belafonte prompts interest in Calypso music; Rockabilly and Rhythm and Blues merge in Rock 'n' Roll;

Art: Georgia O'Keefe and Helen Frankenthaler shows

Fiction: Bellow's Seize the Day, Algren's A Walk on the

Wild Side, Baldwin's Giovanni's Room

Poetry: Pulitzer Richard Wilbur's Things of This World; books by John Berryman, Marianne Moore, Donald Hall

Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems City Lights' Pocket Poets Series #4; Kerouac living with Snyder in Marin County cabin, spends summer as lokout on Desolation Peak, Washington; Snyder leaves for Japan; Kerouac leaves for Mexico City, joined by Ginsberg, Corso, and Orlovsky; Kerouac is writing Visions of Gerard, Desolation Angels, and The Dharma Bums;

Ginsberg returns to New York City, visits William Carlos Williams; his mother dies; Michael McClure and James Harmon edit Ark II-Moby I which blends work of Beats and Black Mountain poets with Buddhist thought; San Francisco Poetry Center directed by Ruth Dewitt features readings by Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, et al.

Broadway: The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Compulsion, Look Back in Anger

Films: The Bridge on the River Kwai, Twelve Angry Men, Peyton Place, A Face in the Crowd

Televison: Mike Wallace Interviews, "Maverick," "American Bandstand," "Gunsmoke"

Music: "Third Stream" combination of Jazz with classical European music as in Modern Jazz Quartet; in reaction Charlie Mingus fosters open and improvisational forms

Art: Picasso exhibit in NY, Chicago, Philadelphia

Fiction: Malamud's The Assistant, Morris's Love among the Cannibals; Durrell's Justine;

James Agee's A Death in the Family (Pulitzer)

Poetry: Pulitzer to Robert Penn Warren's Promises; books by James Wright, Denise Levertov, Nellie Sachs

U.S. Customs seizes Howl in San Francisco; Ferlinghetti and Shig Murao stand trial; Ginsberg is in Europe at the time; Kerouac's On the Road is published by Viking through help of Malcolm Cowley-receives strong NYTimes review, becomes a best seller; Kerouac visits Burroughs in Tangier, helps with Naked Lunch manuscript; Kerouac and mother travel to San Francisco, tries to settle there, meets Philip Whalen and Neal Cassady; love affair in New York with Joyce Glassman (Johnson); Norman Mailer writes "The White Negro" essay on hipsters and Beats; Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency poems published by Grove; Poetry-and-Jazz scene begins in San Francisco with Rexroth and Ferlinghetti performing at The Cellar, Kenneth Patchen and Chamber Jazz Sextet at The Blackhawk; Evergreen Review editors Barney Rossett and Donald Allen do special focus on Beats in "San Francisco Poets" Vol. 2

Broadway: MacLeish's J.B., O'Neil's A Touch of the Poet,

Films: The Defiant Ones, Some Came Running, The Young Lions

Televison: "Naked City," "Peter Gunn," "The Rifleman"; David Susskind's "Open End"

Music: Kingston Trio help launch new Folk Music; first Monterey

Jazz Festival; Duke Elington plays Carnegie Hall;

Fiction: Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, Barth's The End of the Road

Poetry: Pulitzer to Stanley Kunitz' Selected Poems, 1928-1958;books by Muriel Rukeyser, William Meredith, W.C. Williams' Patterson, Book V

Lenny Bruce is performing at S.F. Hungry I, along with Beat comics Lord Buckley, Lou Gottlieb; Burroughs moves to Paris, London, Tangier (1958-1966); Cassady serves two year jail term in San Quentin for possession and sale of marijuana; Kerouac moves to Long Island with mother, publishes The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums, begins work on Lonesome Traveler; Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions); Corso's broadside "Bomb" and book Gasoline (City Lights); Snyder returns to San Francisco, stays at East-West House with Lew Welch, Joanne Kyger, and others studying Zen; Snyder's "Cold Mountain Poems" of Han-Shan published in Evergreen Review; LeRoi and Hettie Jones begin to publish Yugen and Totem Press; Alan Watts's essay "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen" appears in Chicago Review.

Broadway: Loraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun; Gibson's The Miracle Worker, Paddy Chayefsky's The Tenth Man

Films: Room at the Top, Suddenly, Last Summer, On the Beach

Television: Top Quiz Shows exposed as pretense; "The Many Loves of Dobey Gillis" includes Beatnik Maynard G. Krebs; "The Twilight Zone," "The Late Show"

Music: Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come, Miles Davis and John Coltrane create "free jazz"; Rock 'n' Roll receives wide acceptance despite some protests of its moral corruption

Fiction: Roth's Goodbye Columbus and Five Short Stories,Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s The Sirens of Titan, Leon Uris' Exodus; Allen Drury's Advise and Consent wins Pulitzer;

Poetry: Pulitzer to William Snodgrass' Heart's Needle; books by Robert Duncan, James Wright, Robert Lowell

Beatitude magazine edited by Bob Kaufmann, Ferlinghetti, et al; Rexroth turns on Beats, attacks them as pretenders; after Chicago Review is censored,Big Tablepublishes Burroughs' "Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch"; then book Naked Lunch is published by Olympia Press of Paris; Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger marry in Japan in order to live together in Zen monastery; his Riprap is published by Origin Press; Philip Whalen publishes Self-Portrait from Another Direction (Auerhahn Press); Beat film Pull My Daisy is produced and directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, with Kerouac's narration and Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Corso; New Cinema follows Beat parallels of spontaneity and realism, example John Cassavetes' Shadows; Lew Welch meets Kerouac in S.F. and drives him to New York; Kerouac's Dr. Sax, Maggie Cassady and Mexico City Blues are published; Ginsberg records his Howl for Fantasy Records and is writing Kaddish. Articles on "The Beats" begin to appear in Time, Life, and in Lawrence Lipton's critical The Holy Barbarians; Michael McClure's Hymns to St. Geryon (Auerhahn); McClure directs production of his play The Feast! using beastial language and performed by Bay area poets and artists; Philip Lamantia's Ekstasis & Narcotica (Auerhahn); David Meltzer's Ragas; he and wife Christina are performing with folk music in S.F.; Ferlinghetti's "Tentative Descripion of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower" read at Berkeley and receives cool response from some Beats as too politically involved-Ferlingheti responds with quotes from Sartre on the need for engagement, concludes "Only the dead are disengaged."

Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg travel to Chile for South American Conference of Leftist writing; Ferlinghetti's surrealist novel Her (New Directions)

Broadway: Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic; Jean Anouilh's Becket; An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May

Films: The Apartment, Psycho, Never on a Sunday, Spartacus

Television: Route 66, The Flintstones, Face the Nation, The Bob Newhart Show

Music: Dave Brubeck's Time Out, John Coltrane's Meditations

Fiction: William Styron's Set this House on Fire, John Updike's Rabbit, Run, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

Poetry: books by James Dickey, Kenneth Koch, W.S. Merwin, Anne Sexton, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov

Donald Allen publishes New American Poets anthology featuring many of the Beats; Burroughs begins using cut-up techniques in Minutes to Go and Exterminator; Kerouac tries futiley to write at Ferlinghetti's cabin in Bixby Canyon at Big Sur, makes friendships with Lew Welch and Leonore Kandel, Philip Whalen, and Ferlinghetti; Ginsberg in South America, at Harvard takes LSD with Timothy Leary, Proliferation of Beat writings: Snyder's Riprap and Myths and Tests (Totem/Corinth); Corso's The Happy Birthday of Death (New Directions); Whalen's Like I Say; (Totem/Corinth); Jack Spicer's After Lorca Poems; Philip Lamantia's Exstasis & Narcotica; writings about the Beats: Rexroth's Bird in the Hand: Essays; Elias Wilentz's The Beat Scene (Corinth); Thomas Parkinson prepares A Casebook on the Beat (Crowell); Seymour Krim's The Beats (Fawcett).

Sources: The Beat Story

American Chronicle: Six Decades in American Life 1920-1980, eds. Lois Gordon and Alan Gordon (N.Y.: Atheneum, 1987).

A Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 16 The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, ed. Ann Charters (Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Co. 1983).

Gifford, Barry and Lawrence Lee. Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac (N.Y. : Penguin, 1978).

Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History from Its Beginnings to the Present Day, eds. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco: City Lights, 1980).

McClure, Michael. Scratching the Beat Surface (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982).

The New America Poetry, ed. Donald Allen (N.Y.: Grove, 1960).

The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (N.Y.: Penguin, 1992).

Smith, Larry. Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Poet-at-Large (Carbondale, Ill. Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.)