The names attached to these groups change from era to era, but inevitably this social dichotomy is either present, coming into being, or vanishing, a process I have termed the "Bohemian dialectic" after the dialectic described by Marx: the thesis generating its antithesis, which is then absorbed, the two parts coalescing through a synthesis of extremes. And then the process begins again. The emergence of a Beat Generation during the fifties was one example of this phenomenon at work.
The "Beat" phenomenon had its roots in New York's Greenwich Village, where the Bohemian scene of the late forties fermented in relative anonymity. Gradually during the fifties it came to the attention of magazines such as Time and Life, and the inevitable reduction to stereotype began. The term "Beatnik" was coined by the popular press (0). It was applied more and more generally until a caricature emerged as the symbolic representative for an entire Beat Generation: the iconic "Beatnik" "with beard, rumpled clothes, sandals, bongo drum, jazz records and copy of Howl." (Wilentz 1960). A generation was being born. Or more properly: a generation was being delineated, defined, and named. In addition to the "Beatnik" label, the members of that generation were variously called "white negros" (Mailer 1957), "holy barbarians" (Lipton 1959), "angelheaded hipsters" (Ginsberg 1986), and "know-nothing Bohemians" (Podhertz 1960).
Over time the original beat Bohemian as rebel vanished, to be replaced with his sanitized equivalent: a pre-Gilligan Bob Denver as Maynard Krebs, seen nationwide each week on TV's Dobie Gillis. During the late sixties the Beat Generation faded from public view, but the Bohemian dialectic continued with another incarnation of Bohemia: the hippies, entering the cycle.
Behind the "Beatnik" caricature was the core of a generation, a Beat Generation, the nucleus about which most of the media hype and notoriety swirled. This was not the first generation which had had a capitalized label hung around its shoulders. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and their social circle were at the heart of what was called a Lost Generation, a term which Fitzgerald himself examined in a 1928 article for Esquire magazine (Fitzgerald 1928):
By a generation I mean that reaction against the fathers which seems to occur about three times in a century. It is distinguished by a set of ideas, inherited in moderated form from the madmen and outlaws of the generation before; if it is a real generation it has its own leaders and spokesmen, and it draws into its orbit those born just before it and just after, whose ideas are less clear-cut and defiant.While a bit too affluent to comfortably fit with our present day concept of Bohemianism, the Lost Generation nonetheless rebelled against the conventions of their day, and their behavior was reported with the trademark combination of shocked outrage and envy.
The Bohemia of the Beats harked back to "the madmen and outlaws of the generation before," as Fitzgerald's had. In introducing his book of essays on the Beat Generation, author Gregory Stephenson finds ancestry for the Beats in many areas, writing that "the forebears, precursors, ancestors, and antecedents of the Beat Generation include the Lost Generation, hipsterism, Bohemianism, radicalism, dadism, and surrealism" (Stephenson 1990).
For our purposes, we can identify a few key Beat figures, a small number of writers, many of them friends. Membership in that nucleus is variously defined, but the names which are most frequently linked with the Beat Generation are Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This paper will focus on some of those writers and their publishers, and although it is neither a sociological nor a cultural study, it will inevitably draw upon aspects of both of those disciplines. It is primarily a historical study, and will examine the history of the Beat writers in print, the relationship of these writers to the publishing industry, and the role(s) that the publishing industry played in the transformation of a few outspoken avant-garde writers into the spokespeople for a Generation. In addition two appendices will briefly examine aspects of the topic which deserve more detailed examination than was possible here.