Beat Generation

Beat Generation 

For many people in America, the years immediately following World War I and World War II were characterized by anger, discontent, and disillusionment. Society had been devastated by a global conflict that resulted in unprecedented death, destruction and resentment. Survivors who came of age during these eras — termed the Lost Generation after WWI and the Beat Generation after WWII — were left disjointed and alienated from both the world before and the new world that emerged after. Unable to identify with either pre- or postwar values, both of which, after the war, seemed deceptive and perverted, these social exiles were abandoned by their country and left to rediscover and redefine themselves in a world that had stifled their hopes, dreams and beliefs.
It was during these times that literature emerged in an attempt to capture the attitudes, emotions and opinions of their generations. The works of the most successful writers literally became bibles to those who thought they had lost their identity but had rediscovered themselves in these books. To such people, these novels became their defining elements, and by resurrecting their individualism, they had found a point of departure from which they could finally rebuild their lives. In each of the periods following the world wars, one novel emerged as the dominant literary work that best captured the disorder felt by the common man. Both are semi-autobiographical, written by two individuals who felt as disillusioned and abandoned by society as the rest of their generations did. Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (1957) have been considered the essential prose of the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation because their common theme of alienation and detachment reflected the attitudes of their respective times.
The term “Lost Generation” was originally coined in conversation by Gertrude Stein, a member of the expatriate circle in 1920’s Paris. While...