Allen Ginsberg, born on June 3, 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, was one of the founders of the Beatnik subculture. His mother was a Communist and extremely paranoid, often trusting her son while scared of her family and the rest of society. Ginsberg struggled through family conflicts and homosexuali...

The writings of the poets of the Beat Generation, namely Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, resulted from the many factors of the time in which they wrote. They were accused of being crazy, yet their only real fault was writing with complete honesty. Their originality consequently placed them on the...

The Literary Genius and the Downfalls of Success Of all authors who would eventually be labeled as "Beat Writers," three emerged as arguably the most prolific and inspirational. They were a shy, Jewish boy from New Jersey, an ex-high school football player from Massachusetts, and a wi...

The Life and Tragedy of Jack Kerouac Jack Kerouac was a poet who focused on the forgotten people of the world. Wherever he traveled he found the places nobody wanted to find and turned the un-pretty into magnificent poetry. Kerouac used the people no one wanted to remember and turned them into ...

Beats and Beatniks - two terms, conventionally related, but worlds apart in actuality. They represent almost total opposites and yet they are linked in the American conciousness in as intimate a way as possible. And what better way to study something than by comparing it to its opposite? And in that...

Jack Kerouac Born in the town of Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, Jack Kerouac was born to Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac, a French-Canadian couple in which Jack didn't even learn to speak English until age 6, when he was enrolled in school. Jack Kerouac would aspire to be one of the most inspi...