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Circles of the Twentieth Century #2
The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960
The second volume in the acclaimed series that brings to life the groups of avant-garde writers, artists, and patrons who were keystones of what has come to be called Modernism, this book sheds new light on the hard-living, maverick poets and novelists--William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others--who coalesced into the Beats. Illustrations.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Hardcover edition.
399 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
June 8, 2015
Watson writes a good book about a sour subject. Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac represented and metastasized a decade of ennui, anger, obsession, and violence, and along the way created the script for the homogenized and mainstreamed "Beat Generation."
Watson does not romanticize his subjects or their milieu. Their lives were a bitter stew of broken homes, sociopathic relationships, violent psychotic behavior, rampant drug addiction, violence against women, inability to focus on work or education, petty criminal activity, promiscuous sexual behavior, and finally two violent and virtually unpunished murders. These were not likable men with leadership qualities. William Burroughs, notorious among his friends for his collection of often-used guns and his raging drug addictions, shot and killed his common-law wife and mother of his two children (born drug-addicted because of her drug abuse) during a drunken "game" of William Tell. He served 13 days in prison, was released on $2,312 bail, and fled the country. No mention is made of any remorse or concern on his part for the children, and in fact no mention is made of their safety or future whereabouts.
Their writings were disoriented, vulgar, and obscene. They did not fit into any recognizable genre, they served no redeeming purpose, and when finally published (by small literary journals and fringe publishers) were mostly ignored or roundly criticized by critics, whose criticisms automatically marked them as reactionary, irrelevant, and beholden to the literary establishment.
Finally Kerouac's "On the Road", Burrough's "Naked Lunch", and Ginsberg's "Howl" did get published and noticed and became cause celebres among a growing counter-culture centered in New York and San Francisco. Interestingly, their recognition as "Beat" poets and leaders of a new genre hardened the arteries of this new young bloodstream on the American cultural scene into a caricature of itself, symbolized by Maynard G. Krebs on the dreadful television series "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis."
Now celebrities, the genuinely sordid recent past of Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac was either forgotten or romanticized into mythic rebellion against the straitjacket of the Cold-War Organization-Man McCarthyite 50's.
Watson deconstructs that aura simply by providing the biographical backgrounds and describing the actions and settings of the actual events. The book is laid out with wide margins which contain photographs, quotes from the three main characters, and small bits of history, such as the contents of the bookshelves of the characters, that amplify, energize, and validate Watson's account.
Proof of the success of the book's layout and the quality of Watson's writing is that I found myself compelled to read and propelled through the book with a deepening fascination despite the total lack of likability and redeeming characteristics of these men.
Some readers of this review will find my extreme reaction, well, reactionary. Ginsburg, Burroughs, and Kerouac are, at a half-century's remove, now honored as the "visionaries" of the subtitle of this book, their works considered by most critics as 20th-century classics. I did try to read Burrough's "Naked Lunch" about a year ago, and found it truly obscene in a most disagreeable way--incoherently rambling and so unpleasantly violent that I could only stomach a few pages before putting it down with no desire to go back. There may have been a pearl in this filth; there are too many other pearls more easily in reach in the great creative works of history for me to degrade myself in the effort of picking the pearl out of this gutter.
Still Watson's book makes a worthy introduction to the characters, settings, and actions that forged this genre, regardless of your reaction to the writers and their literature.
Watson does not romanticize his subjects or their milieu. Their lives were a bitter stew of broken homes, sociopathic relationships, violent psychotic behavior, rampant drug addiction, violence against women, inability to focus on work or education, petty criminal activity, promiscuous sexual behavior, and finally two violent and virtually unpunished murders. These were not likable men with leadership qualities. William Burroughs, notorious among his friends for his collection of often-used guns and his raging drug addictions, shot and killed his common-law wife and mother of his two children (born drug-addicted because of her drug abuse) during a drunken "game" of William Tell. He served 13 days in prison, was released on $2,312 bail, and fled the country. No mention is made of any remorse or concern on his part for the children, and in fact no mention is made of their safety or future whereabouts.
Their writings were disoriented, vulgar, and obscene. They did not fit into any recognizable genre, they served no redeeming purpose, and when finally published (by small literary journals and fringe publishers) were mostly ignored or roundly criticized by critics, whose criticisms automatically marked them as reactionary, irrelevant, and beholden to the literary establishment.
Finally Kerouac's "On the Road", Burrough's "Naked Lunch", and Ginsberg's "Howl" did get published and noticed and became cause celebres among a growing counter-culture centered in New York and San Francisco. Interestingly, their recognition as "Beat" poets and leaders of a new genre hardened the arteries of this new young bloodstream on the American cultural scene into a caricature of itself, symbolized by Maynard G. Krebs on the dreadful television series "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis."
Now celebrities, the genuinely sordid recent past of Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac was either forgotten or romanticized into mythic rebellion against the straitjacket of the Cold-War Organization-Man McCarthyite 50's.
Watson deconstructs that aura simply by providing the biographical backgrounds and describing the actions and settings of the actual events. The book is laid out with wide margins which contain photographs, quotes from the three main characters, and small bits of history, such as the contents of the bookshelves of the characters, that amplify, energize, and validate Watson's account.
Proof of the success of the book's layout and the quality of Watson's writing is that I found myself compelled to read and propelled through the book with a deepening fascination despite the total lack of likability and redeeming characteristics of these men.
Some readers of this review will find my extreme reaction, well, reactionary. Ginsburg, Burroughs, and Kerouac are, at a half-century's remove, now honored as the "visionaries" of the subtitle of this book, their works considered by most critics as 20th-century classics. I did try to read Burrough's "Naked Lunch" about a year ago, and found it truly obscene in a most disagreeable way--incoherently rambling and so unpleasantly violent that I could only stomach a few pages before putting it down with no desire to go back. There may have been a pearl in this filth; there are too many other pearls more easily in reach in the great creative works of history for me to degrade myself in the effort of picking the pearl out of this gutter.
Still Watson's book makes a worthy introduction to the characters, settings, and actions that forged this genre, regardless of your reaction to the writers and their literature.
June 7, 2020
This is impeccably researched and packed to the gills with information. It's full of photographs and drawings; the margins of the pages contain quotes from the Beats' letters and conversations as well as quotes about them. They also contain a glossary of slang vocabulary from the time period. Contains several fascinating charts of the relationships among the major players and a multi-page timeline of Beat events and world events at the end.
I started rereading this because I'm trying to reread the collected Ginsberg (all one hundred and million pages of it) and got bogged down; I don't really like Ginsberg, so this is a purgative activity. Once I reread his poetry, then I can shuffle it off to elsewhere. LOL Anyway, this provides a great deal of important context for those poems, and I wish I'd read it first before even attempting to slog through the Ginsburg.
I have almost no patience for the Beats. I didn't like them when I first encountered them in the undergraduate course that required me to buy this book (and Ginsberg's collected poems and two books of Corso and a book about the women of the movement), and I don't like them now. I have no patience for the glorification of addiction and the insistence that narcotics and alcohol open some kind of conduit to Truth and Genius and Spirituality. I have zero patience with their inability to hold down jobs and their glorification of criminality. I loathe the way they treat the women in their lives, and I shudder to think how messed up their kids must have been to grow up in houses where people were always drunk and shooting up (I really feel for Burroughs's kids; the oldest, Julie, was 8-10 when he killed their mom accidentally; they were not present at the time which is a small mercy).
Yet there is something undeniably compelling about their writing and their lives, something in their yearning for something different that speaks to me. There is a power in the poetry that resonates despite my antipathy to a lot of their message.
I mostly don't like Ginsburg's poetry (although admittedly, I'm only about 200 pages into an almost 800 page collection), I like a fair amount of Corso's poetry, and I've never read the other major Beat writers (Kerouac, Burroughs).
Anyway, if you are at all interested in learning about the men (and this book focuses exclusively on the men with the exception of Joan Vollmer, Burroughs's wife, and a smidge about Carolyn Cassady) of the movement and the literary, political, and social context of the time period, this is a really good place to find what you're looking for.
I started rereading this because I'm trying to reread the collected Ginsberg (all one hundred and million pages of it) and got bogged down; I don't really like Ginsberg, so this is a purgative activity. Once I reread his poetry, then I can shuffle it off to elsewhere. LOL Anyway, this provides a great deal of important context for those poems, and I wish I'd read it first before even attempting to slog through the Ginsburg.
I have almost no patience for the Beats. I didn't like them when I first encountered them in the undergraduate course that required me to buy this book (and Ginsberg's collected poems and two books of Corso and a book about the women of the movement), and I don't like them now. I have no patience for the glorification of addiction and the insistence that narcotics and alcohol open some kind of conduit to Truth and Genius and Spirituality. I have zero patience with their inability to hold down jobs and their glorification of criminality. I loathe the way they treat the women in their lives, and I shudder to think how messed up their kids must have been to grow up in houses where people were always drunk and shooting up (I really feel for Burroughs's kids; the oldest, Julie, was 8-10 when he killed their mom accidentally; they were not present at the time which is a small mercy).
Yet there is something undeniably compelling about their writing and their lives, something in their yearning for something different that speaks to me. There is a power in the poetry that resonates despite my antipathy to a lot of their message.
I mostly don't like Ginsburg's poetry (although admittedly, I'm only about 200 pages into an almost 800 page collection), I like a fair amount of Corso's poetry, and I've never read the other major Beat writers (Kerouac, Burroughs).
Anyway, if you are at all interested in learning about the men (and this book focuses exclusively on the men with the exception of Joan Vollmer, Burroughs's wife, and a smidge about Carolyn Cassady) of the movement and the literary, political, and social context of the time period, this is a really good place to find what you're looking for.
April 2, 2013
Jazz, drugs, sexual adventurism, existential nihilism, dark glasses, bohemian non-conformity, cool disaffection, gratuitous despair. What's not to like? The beats followed the world war and preceeded the hippies. Only in America.
April 12, 2019
Extremely informative
May 16, 2022
2.5 stars. Very informative. I admittedly knew very little of “The Beat Generation” before starting this book. I learned that I would not have wanted to be in the same room with any of them.
April 6, 2023
Very well researched, comprehensive and full of fascinating details.
June 21, 2025
Absolutely jam-packed with information, literally everything you could ever want to know about the Beat period is covered here.
February 13, 2014
In The Birth of the Beat Generation, Steven Watson takes the reader on a trip through the ups and downs of the main characters of the Beat movement of the 1950s. Beginning with a simple scene setting, he dives right into the childhood years of the major Beat icons. Afterwards, his narrative changes from person as subject to event as subject. Following the introductions of Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg, each new subsection is informally titled by events Watson considers to be important factors in the evolution of the Beats, i.e. “Getting Published I: The Town and the City,” “Ginsberg Visits the Cassadys,” and “The Renaissance in High Gear.”
It is interesting how these men, meeting each other early in their collegiate careers, always gravitated back to one another. There may have been miles, and sometimes even an ocean, separating them, but they were never truly apart for very long: trips across the country, to Mexico and South America, to Tangiers, to Paris; trips into unknown parts of their psyches; and, finally, trips back home. No matter how many trips they took, they always returned to each other. Watson shows how these friendships borne out of feelings of alienation and euphoria lasted for most of their lifetimes.
The book is divided into sections and subsections rather than traditional chapters. This structure can be distracting and unnecessary. It seems as though Watson is attempting to channel some type of Beat influence by avoiding a traditional structure. If this is the case, he is unsuccessful in “Beat”-ifying his text. In addition, the book contains much substance about the Beat Generation, but has little new information for the reader. It also lacks analysis and interpretation. It reads as though Watson sat down with the diaries of Kerouac, Burroughs, Carr, Ginsburg, Cassady, Corso, and the supporting cast of Beats to develop a narrative description of the events in their lives. Using a more traditional structure may have been helpful in achieving an analysis of the Beats as well as their influence on each other, their generation, and the Baby Boomers who were coming of age towards the end of the Beats reign.
Although the sidebar information is interesting, it is disconnected from the text. Nowhere was the content connected to the sidebar, especially the bookshelf lists and the Beat dictionary entries. The bookshelf entries showed some insight into the reading habits of the main Beat characters, but aside from passive discussion, the lists contributed little to the overall text. As for the dictionary entries, had the terms been used in the body of the text on that page, they would have made more sense.
Sadly, Watson treats women as afterthoughts or simply as a crazy, drug or alcohol addicted, sex receptacles. Many women obviously left their marks on the men of the Beat Generation, but Watson skims over a huge potential for in depth analysis through the women in their lives. He tries to make up for it at the end, but lumps female Beats and Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s mothers in with the stereotypical “beatniks” in the final section. By avoiding a serious discussion of the women of the Beat Generation, Watson leaves a hole in the story of the Beats.
It is interesting how these men, meeting each other early in their collegiate careers, always gravitated back to one another. There may have been miles, and sometimes even an ocean, separating them, but they were never truly apart for very long: trips across the country, to Mexico and South America, to Tangiers, to Paris; trips into unknown parts of their psyches; and, finally, trips back home. No matter how many trips they took, they always returned to each other. Watson shows how these friendships borne out of feelings of alienation and euphoria lasted for most of their lifetimes.
The book is divided into sections and subsections rather than traditional chapters. This structure can be distracting and unnecessary. It seems as though Watson is attempting to channel some type of Beat influence by avoiding a traditional structure. If this is the case, he is unsuccessful in “Beat”-ifying his text. In addition, the book contains much substance about the Beat Generation, but has little new information for the reader. It also lacks analysis and interpretation. It reads as though Watson sat down with the diaries of Kerouac, Burroughs, Carr, Ginsburg, Cassady, Corso, and the supporting cast of Beats to develop a narrative description of the events in their lives. Using a more traditional structure may have been helpful in achieving an analysis of the Beats as well as their influence on each other, their generation, and the Baby Boomers who were coming of age towards the end of the Beats reign.
Although the sidebar information is interesting, it is disconnected from the text. Nowhere was the content connected to the sidebar, especially the bookshelf lists and the Beat dictionary entries. The bookshelf entries showed some insight into the reading habits of the main Beat characters, but aside from passive discussion, the lists contributed little to the overall text. As for the dictionary entries, had the terms been used in the body of the text on that page, they would have made more sense.
Sadly, Watson treats women as afterthoughts or simply as a crazy, drug or alcohol addicted, sex receptacles. Many women obviously left their marks on the men of the Beat Generation, but Watson skims over a huge potential for in depth analysis through the women in their lives. He tries to make up for it at the end, but lumps female Beats and Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s mothers in with the stereotypical “beatniks” in the final section. By avoiding a serious discussion of the women of the Beat Generation, Watson leaves a hole in the story of the Beats.
July 21, 2016
I read this for a special topics course in beat literature in school. I remember the course itself being a great experience. I also remember pretending to enjoy the beats way more than I did because of the enthusiasm of the professor and the drive to be as cool as my classmates who were obviously relating much more deeply to Kerouac, Ginsberg, et al than I was. This book was assigned for general background for the course and was by far my favorite thing I read that semester. In particular, I enjoyed the drugged out misadventures of William Burroughs and the insanity around the William Tell inspired killing of his wife. Great book even those without much interest in the beats and their sometimes precious style of literature.
August 9, 2016
I picked this book up when I visited San Francisco for the first time. I had heard about the Beat Generation but didn't fully know who and what it was about until I read this book. Very interesting read. I recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the Beat Generation and wants a succinct, fascinating story to read.
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November 11, 2008Brushing up.
September 23, 2010
I really think these guys were annoying as all get-out, but for some reason I force myself to keep reading about them.
March 6, 2013
Very informative. Fun to read, nice set up. I like that it never lingered too much on one topic and therefore stayed interesting.
Good use of quotes, pictures and slang for support.
Good use of quotes, pictures and slang for support.
January 29, 2008
Will make anyone a fan of the Beats! Great book.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews