The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest

Harvard Divinity School

On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest Author(s): Stephen Prothero Reviewed work(s): Source: The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 84, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 205-222 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity School Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1509800 . Accessed: 28/12/2011 04:35
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HTR 84:2 (1991) 205-22

ON THE HOLY ROAD: THE BEAT MOVEMENTAS SPIRITUALPROTEST

Stephen Prothero Georgia State University

For the beat generation of the 1940s and 1950s, dissertation time is here. Magazine and newspaper critics have gotten in their jabs. Now scholars are starting to analyze the literature and legacy of the beat writers. In the last few years biographers have lined up to interpret the lives of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, and publishers have rushed into print a host of beat journals, letters, memoirs, and anthologies.1 The most recent Dictionary of Literary Biography devotes two large volumes to sixtyseven beat writers, including Neal Cassady, Herbert Huncke, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,Philip Lamantia, Peter Orlovsky, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen. Historical writing on relatively recent subjects tends to get bogged down in issues...