¹ See Nicosia, Gerald, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (New York: Grove, 1983)Google Scholar ; McNally, Dennis, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979)Google Scholar ; Miller, Barry, Ginsberg: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989)Google Scholar ; Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (New York: Henry Holt, 1988)Google Scholar . Notable memoirs include Cassady, Carolyn, Off the Road: My Life with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg (New York: William Morrow, 1990)Google Scholar ; and Johnson, Joyce, Minor Characters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983)Google Scholar.

² On 5 September 1957, New York Times literary critic Gilbert Millstein hailed the appearance of Jack Kerouac's On the Road as “a historic occasion” comparable to the publication of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Millstein's review is reprinted in Gifford, Barry and Lee, Lawrence, Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac (New York: Saint Martin's, 1978) 238Google Scholar . During the “Howl” obscenity trial of 1957, Kenneth Rexroth praised Ginsberg's work as “probably the most remarkable single poem published by a young man since the second world war” (Ehrlich, J. W., ed., Howl of the Censor [San Carlos, CA: Nourse, 1961] 64)Google Scholar.

³ Wain, John, “The Great Burroughs Affair,” New Republic, 1 12 1962, 21.Google Scholar

⁴ Podhoretz, Norman, “letter to the editor,” Partisan Review 25 (Summer 1958) 476.Google Scholar

⁵ Parkinson, Thomas, ed., A Casebook on the Beat (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1961) 232.Google Scholar

⁶ Ibid., 255.

⁷ Podhoretz, Norman, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” Partisan Review 25 (Spring 1958) 307-8, 316.Google Scholar

⁸ Podhoretz, Norman, “letter to the editor,” Partisan Review 25 (Summer 1958) 479Google Scholar . Podhoretz renewed his attack on the occasion of the opening of a Kerouac memorial in Lowell, MA in 1987. See, e.g., his “Spare Us a Revival of Kerouac and the Pied Pipers of Despair,” Los Angeles Times, 8 January 1987, sec. 1.

⁹ Kerouac, Jack, “The Origins of the Beat Generation,” Playboy, 06 1959, 31–79.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Ginsberg, Allen, To Eberhart from Ginsberg (Lincoln, MA: Penman, 1976) 11.Google Scholar

¹¹ Ibid., 21.

¹² Ibid., 32.

¹³ Notable exceptions include Whitlark, James, “The Beats and their Tantric Goddesses: A Study in Erotic Epistemology,” Literature East and West 21 (1977) 148–60Google Scholar ; and Portuges, Paul, The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg (Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson, 1978)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ I refer to Sydney Ahlstrom's otherwise exhaustive A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972)Google Scholar and George Marsden's self-consciously pluralistic Religion and American Culture (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990)Google Scholar as well as Wuthnow, Robert, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar and Silk, Mark, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988)Google Scholar . The beats do receive careful, if divided, attention in Ellwood, Robert S., Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar and Fields, Rick, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America (Boston: Shambala, 1986)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Watts, Alan, Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen (San Francisco: City Lights, 1959) 16.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Jackson, Carl T., “The Counterculture Looks East: Beat Writers and Asian Religion,” American Studies 29 (1988) 51–70.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Miller, Perry, ed., The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950) 8Google Scholar . See also William R. Hutchison's extension and refinement of Miller's thesis in The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in the New England Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ By the reckoning of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, only nine of sixty-seven beat writers were women. Very few female characters appear in Kerouac's books, Burroughs's novels, or Ginsberg's poems. Those that do flitter through like phantoms, appearing here for sex and there to fix a cup of coffee. According to Joyce Johnson, whose aptly titled Minor Characters remains one of the most revealing insider accounts of the beats, “The whole Beat scene had very little to do with the participation of women as artists themselves. The real communication was going on between the men, and the women were there as onlookers.…It was a very masculine aesthetic” (quoted in , Gifford and , Lee, Jack's Book, 235–36)Google Scholar . Exclusion of women veered into blatant misogyny in Burroughs and Cassady and into a near-paranoid distrust of women in Kerouac. See, e.g., Odier, Daniel, The Job: Interview with William Burroughs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969) 113Google Scholar ; Gifford, Barry, ed., As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg & Neal Cassady (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1977) 36Google Scholar.

¹⁹ References to a “new vision” and a “new consciousness” abound in beat literature. See, e.g., “The New Consciousness,” in , Ginsberg, Composed on the Tongue (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox, 1971) 63–93Google Scholar.

²⁰ “Siesta in Xbalba,” in Ginsberg, Allen, Collected Poems, 1947-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984) 105–6Google Scholar . Excerpts from Collected Poems 1947-1980 [copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg] are reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

²¹ Burroughs wrote this piece with a friend named Kells Elvins in 1938. It was finally published as “Twilight's Last Gleamings,” Paris Review 109 (Winter 1988) 12–20Google Scholar.

²² Ferlinghetti, “Junkman's Obbligato,” in idem, A Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions, 1968) 63–64Google Scholar ; reprinted by permission of the publisher.

²³ Corso, Gregory, Ginsberg, Allen, and Orlovsky, Peter, “Reply to Symposium,” Wagner Literary Magazine (Spring 1959) 30.Google Scholar

²⁴ Holmes, John Clellon, “This is the Beat Generation,” New York Times Magazine, 16 11 1952.Google Scholar

²⁵ I am borrowing here from Victor Turner, especially The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969)Google Scholar ; idem , “The Center Out There: Pilgrim's Goal,” HR 12 (1973) 191–230Google Scholar ; and idem with Turner, Edith, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978)Google Scholar . Turner makes this connection between liminality, communitas, and the beats explicit in The Ritual Process, 112-13.

²⁶ Burroughs, William, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove, 1962) 6Google Scholar . Consider also John Clellon Holmes's 1950 journal entry: “Our search is, I firmly believe, a spiritual one.…Our search is for the Rose that we insist must dwell, or at least become visible, after the end of the night has been reached” (Arthur and Knight, Kit, eds., The Beat Vision: A Primary Sourcebook [New York: Paragon House, 1987] 86)Google Scholar.

²⁷ In The Decline of the West (trans. Atkinson, Charles; 2 vols.; New York: Knopf, 1939Google Scholar ) that the beats read and debated in the late 1940s, Oswald Spengler argued (2. 169) that cultures and peoples arise and decline in grand cycles in which “primitives” yield to “culture-peoples” as cultures expand and then to “fellaheen” as cultures degrade. The fellaheen, who exist at the limina of cultures, are from the perspective of culture-builders useless “waste products” who endure the slings and arrows of history without changing events or being changed by them, who identify with all human beings rather than with their nation only (2. 186). A spiritual people, their “second-religiousness” is marked by “a deep piety that fills the waking-consciousness…the naive belief…that there is some sort of mystic constitution of actuality” (2. 311). According to Spengler, fellaheen in every age follow the lead of “world-citizens, world-pacifists, and world-reconcilers…who withdraw themselves out of actuality into cells and study-chambers and spiritual communities, and proclaim the nullity of the world's doings…timeless, a—historic, literary men, men not of destiny, but of reasons and causes, men who are inwardly detached from the pulse of blood and being, wide-awake thinking consciousnesses” (2. 184-85). The beats clearly sympathized with the fellaheen, whose lives Spengler described as “planless happening[s] without goal or cadenced march” (2. 170-71). And at least some of the beats saw themselves as the prophesied “literary men” who would lead the fellaheen into a revolution of the soul.

²⁸ Ginsberg, Allen, “A Version of the Apocalypse,” in , Knights, The Beat Vision, 190.Google Scholar

²⁹ Kerouac, Jack, The Town and the City (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950) 361–62Google Scholar . Excerpts from The Town and the City copyright 1950 by John Kerouac, and renewed 1978 by Stella S. Kerouac, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

³⁰ Ginsberg, Allen, “On Huncke's Back,” The Unspeakable Visions of the Individual 3 (1973) 20–21Google Scholar ; reprinted by permission of the publisher.

³¹ Ibid.

³² See Cassady, Neal, The First Third (San Francisco: City Lights, 1981)Google Scholar ; Plummer, William, The Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981)Google Scholar ; and Carolyn Cassady, Off the Road.

³³ Kerouac, Jack, On the Road (New York: Viking, 1957) 10, 11.Google Scholar

³⁴ Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” in idem, Collected Poems, 128.

³⁵ Ginsberg, Allen, Gay Sunshine Interview (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox, 1974) 23.Google Scholar

³⁶ Ginsberg, Allen, Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness (Ball, Gordon, ed.; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974) 5.Google Scholar

³⁷ Ginsberg, Allen, “A Prefatory Letter,” The Gates of Wrath: Rhymed Poems, 1948-1952 (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox, 1972).Google Scholar

³⁸ Allen Ginsberg, “A Poem on America,” in idem, Collected Poems, 64.

³⁹ Kerouac, Jack, “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” Evergreen Review 2 (Spring 1959) 57.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Kerouac, Jack, Mexico City Blues (New York: Grove, 1959) 65Google Scholar ; reprinted by permission of the publisher.

⁴¹ Ibid., 15.

⁴² Ginsberg, Allen, Planet News (San Francisco: City Lights, 1968) 127Google Scholar ; reprinted by per-mission of HarperCollins Publishers.

⁴³ Kerouac, Jack, “The Last Word,” Escapade (10 1959) 72.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Both of Burrough's letters can be found in Burroughs, William, Letters to Allen Ginsberg: 1953-1957 (New York: Full Court, 1982) 48, 56–58Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Kerouac, Jack, Dharma Bums (New York: Viking, 1957) 13.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Ibid., 105.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 159.

⁴⁸ Kerouac, Jack, Lonesome Traveler (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960) 34–36.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Kerouac, Jack, Dharma Bums, 108.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ , Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind, 88.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Thomas, Clark, “The An of Poetry VIII,” Paris Review 37 (Spring 1966) 36–37.Google Scholar

⁵² Allen Ginsberg, “Footnote to Howl,” in idem, Collected Poems, 134.

⁵³ Kerouac, Jack, “The Art of Fiction LXI,” Paris Review 43 (Summer 1968) 85.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ , Nicosia, Memory Babe, 277, 513.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Classic formulations include Riesman, David, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950)Google Scholar ; Herberg, Will, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1955)Google Scholar ; Whyte, William H., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956)Google Scholar ; Marty, Martin, The New Shape of American Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1959)Google Scholar ; Bell, Daniel, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Collier, 1960)Google Scholar ; Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964)Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ , Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 1079–96Google Scholar . See also his “The Radical Turn in Theology and Ethics: Why It Occurred in the 1960s,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 387 (1970) 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁷ See, e.g. , Llamon, W. T., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990)Google Scholar . Llamon argues that the 1950s belonged at least as much to an “oppositional culture” of method actors, action painters, beat writers, and civil rights activists as to Marcuse's “one-dimensional man.”