Irregular Beats: The Surprising Politics of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg

“It is hard to say whether this philosophy would have had any adherents other than Kerouac, but it would have represented something new and uplifting—a counterculture to the counterculture.”

“We love everything: Billy Graham, the Big Ten, rock and roll, Zen, apple pie, Eisenhower—we dig it all.”

– Jack Kerouac on Nightbeat, 1957

It is not an overstatement to say that Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road had a seismic impact on American youth culture—one that continues to reverberate. Kerouac’s tale of struggling poets, societal outcasts, and one fast-talking con man, all barreling down the highways of America toward no fixed destination, was initially read as a repudiation of the values of 1950s suburban America, even though the events described therein—true events loosely embellished—had occurred in the more idiosyncratic late-1940s just before the mass adoption of television.

Granted, it would have been a rebellious book in any era. But through a happy accident of timing—Kerouac’s manuscript took six years to attract a publisher adventurous enough to take a gamble on it—On the Road appeared after Marlon Brando, James Dean, Bill Haley, and Elvis Presley had primed the youth-culture fuse. Suddenly, Kerouac was not just a working novelist but the media-anointed spokesman for “The Beat Generation”—the phrase itself something Kerouac had coined, half in jest, during a casual conversation with fellow writer John Clellon Holmes several years earlier (as recounted in Allen Ginsberg’s The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats). “Naw, this isn’t a lost generation,” he had said. “This is a beat generation.” He meant “beat” as in downbeat, washed-up, out of options—in other words, nothing to lose. But additional meanings suggested themselves. There was the musical “beat”—first the bebop rhythms that informed Kerouac’s prose and then, as the 1950s unfolded, the insistent backbeat of nascent rock ‘n’ roll and all the rowdiness associated with it.