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Beat

A national group of poets who emerged from San Francisco’s literary counterculture in the 1950s, including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder.

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    Beat poets

    A national group of poets who emerged from San Francisco’s literary counterculture in the 1950s. Its ranks included Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder. Poet and essayist Kenneth Rexroth influenced the development of the “Beat” aesthetic, which rejected academic formalism and the materialism and conformity of the American middle class. Beat poetry is largely free verse, often surrealistic, and influenced by the cadences of jazz, as well by Zen and Native American spirituality. Browse more Beat poets.

  • Author

    Jack Hirschman

    Jack Hirschman was born in New York City and grew up in the Bronx. A copyeditor with the Associated Press in New York as a young man, his earliest brush with fame came from a letter Ernest Hemingway wrote ...
  • Author

    Kenneth Patchen

    Kenneth Patchen was born into a poor family in Niles, Ohio. He moved to Wisconsin after high school and studied at the University of Wisconsin. He then held a variety of jobs as a migrant worker in the United...
  • Author

    Diane Wakoski

    Poet and essayist Diane Wakoski was born in Whittier, California. She earned her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with poets such as Thom Gunn and Josephine Miles. After finishing...
  • Author

    Anselm Hollo

    Poet and translator Anselm Hollo was born in Helsinki, Finland in 1934. He lived in England for many years, working for the BBC European Services. In 1967, he moved to the United States and taught at various...
  • Author

    Lew Welch

    Poet Lewis Barrett Welch was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1926. After his parents divorced, he moved with his mother and sister to a series of California towns. After high school, he served briefly in the ...
  • Author

    Bob Kaufman

    A Beat poet, and founder of the journal Beatitude with Allen Ginsberg and others, poet Bob Kaufman was born in New Orleans in 1925 to a German Jewish father and a black Catholic mother. As a young man, he ...
  • Author

    Diane di Prima

    Feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement...
  • Author

    Allen Ginsberg

    Allen Ginsberg was an acclaimed poet and a leading figure of the Beat Generation whose radical literary works and advocacy for social change left an indelible mark on American counterculture. Ginsberg first...
  • Author

    Lawrence Ferlinghetti

    Poet, playwright, publisher, and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born Lawrence Monsanto Ferling on March 24, 1919 in Yonkers, New York. His father, an Italian immigrant, had shortened the family name upon...
  • Author

    William Everson

    William Everson was a poet, critic, and globally renowned handset printer. Born in Sacramento, California to Christian Scientist parents, Everson declared himself an agnostic when he was a teenager. During...
  • Author

    Gregory Corso

    Gregory Corso was a key member of the Beat movement, a group of convention-breaking writers who were credited with sparking much of the social and political change that transformed the United States in the...
  • Author

    Richard Brautigan

    Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington. He had a difficult childhood, and he did not attend college. When he was in his 20s, he moved to San Francisco, California. Robert Novak wrote in Dictionary...
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