The 1950’s Culture(Beat Generation)

“The Beat Generation” is a term that applies to a group of American poets and novelists of the 1950s and 1960s who rebelled against American culture and values.

They viewed the United States as conservative, imperial, and constrictive. The atomic bomb, the war in Vietnam, and ecological pollution were sources of great concern that fueled their unease and disillusionment. For the young generation, it was an “age of anxiety.”

To many writers of the Beat Generation, it seemed that Western civilization and its cultural ideas were spiritually bankrupt.

The writers who identified with the Beat Generation scorned the complacent, hypocrisy of American Life.

A backyard bomb shelter in 1955. Garden City, New York.

Jack Kerouac was one of the first writers to bring the Beat Movement into public attention. Born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac was an excellent athlete who earned a football scholarship to attend Columbia University.

In New York City, he met William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

Jack Kerouac

Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey. His father, Louis, was a poet and a high school English teacher; he was a conservative man who wrote “timid, conventional verses.” His mother, Naomi, was politically radical, idealistic, and emotional.

Attended Columbia, befriended Kerouac and Burroughs.

Poem “Howl.”

Allen Ginsberg

Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at Kerouac’s grave

Popular Culture

FCC Federal Communications Commission: government agency that regulates and licenses tv, telephone.

Golden Age of TV.

I Love Lucy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g10jFL423ho

Leave it to Beaver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULK_PNaS6d0&spfreload=10

Miles Davis, Nat King Cole.Jazz: style of music characterized by use of improvisation

Rock n’ Roll & Jazz:

Chuck Berry- electric guitar, duck walk Songs: Johnny B Goode

Elvis Presley- “King of Rock n’ Roll”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG7UL9NfP8c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abGzxWuLQP8

Lyrics: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/thetimestheyareachangin.html

BOB DYLAN