largely written in a three-week marathon in 1951 but was not published until 1957. It became not only a best-seller, but the enduring testament of a generation. That same year, Ginsberg and Kerouac traveled to Tangier to help Burroughs type and organize the manuscript that would be published as Naked Lunch a few years later; it, too, was tried for obscenity. The Beats' literary careers crossed over into the arena of popular culture, and now, decades later, these writers are celebrated in advertisements, movies, and songs. Their identity as poets-as-rock-stars sometimes obscures their contribution to American literature. Psychological candor, enshrinement of the commonplace, and the writing of "spontaneous prose" are some of their key contributions. Following in the tradition of William Carlos Williams and Thomas Wolfe, they created works that spoke in the native vernacular, shorn of highbrow pretension. They introduced the speech of the marginal and musical into American literature. The San Francisco RenaissanceAllen Ginsberg's reading of "Howl" in October 1955 marks the beginning of the San Francisco Renaissance. But the city had its own literary community long before that time, dominated in the 1940s by three poets--Kenneth Rexroth, Brother Antoninus, and Robert Duncan. In the mid-1950s a younger generation joined them, including Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, Lew Welch and Bob Kaufman. Together, these disparate writers created a vital and productive artistic community, whose identity was strengthened by their geographical distance from New York. Kenneth Rexroth identified some of the elements that made it a center for art and poetry: the city was the most livable city in America, tolerant of many lifestyles, and independent of the forces represented by New York's commercial gallery and publishing combines. The San Francisco poets looked to nature and to Asia for inspiration, and t...
