re: Pictures from days gone by....

Actually zoomed in and read this in its entirety.

I find it very interesting that the age cohort being described in this article as "the beat generation" is essentially the same as the one dubbed (many years later) as "the greatest generation":

"the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink once it was over"..

"brought up during the collective bad circumstance of a dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war "

"they grew to independent minds on beachheads, in ginmills and U.S.O.'s, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures"

"The same face, with a more serious bent, stared from the pages of Life magazine, representing a graduating class of ex-G.I.'s"


Note that Kerouac himself served (briefly) in WWII in the merchant marine, and his stand-in character from On the Road (Sal Paradise) was described as going to school on the GI Bill.

Yet, when we think of the "Beat Generation" most of us think of beatniks, sitting around in coffeehouses and bars reciting beat poetry, wearing black and playing bongos, listening to modern jazz, etc.

When we think of the "Greatest Generation" we picture kids going hungry in the Depression, then serving as young adults (either overseas in the military or on the homefront) in WWII, then almost immediately starting families ( the baby boom) and becoming dads and moms in the new suburbias during the 1950s.

Two very different images of what is essentially the same generation. I guess the key is that the whole beatnik side was more of a subculture, which I don't think that John Clellon Holmes made clear (or foresaw) in this 1952 piece. Maybe he thought MORE of that generation/age cohort would be more "beat" or "beatnik" as the decade wore on.

But more likely, it is that urbanized, city-focused east- and west-coast focus and bias. None of his anecdotes are from middle America or suburbia. It's all California, Los Angeles, the Bronx, Illinois (no doubt Chicago), bar on Third Avenue.

Same as it ever was...