Editing Beatnik (section)

==History==
[[File:BeatGenerationLOC.jpg|thumb|Poster for ''[[The Beat Generation (film)|The Beat Generation]]'' (1959)]]
In 1948, [[Jack Kerouac]] introduced the phrase "Beat Generation", generalizing from his social circle to characterize the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York City at that time. The name came up in conversation with [[John Clellon Holmes]], who published an early Beat Generation novel titled ''[[Go (Holmes novel)|Go]]'' (1952), along with the manifesto ''This Is the Beat Generation'' in ''The New York Times Magazine''.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.litkicks.com/ThisIsTheBeatGeneration|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111122040720/http://www.litkicks.com/Texts/ThisIsBeatGen.html|url-status=dead|title="This is the Beat Generation" by John Clellon Holmes|date=July 24, 1994|archive-date=November 22, 2011|website=Literary Kicks}}</ref> In 1954, [[Nolan Miller (author)|Nolan Miller]] published his third novel ''Why I Am So Beat'' (Putnam), detailing the weekend parties of four students.

"Beat" came from underworld slang—the world of hustlers, drug addicts, and petty thieves—from which [[Allen Ginsberg]] and Kerouac sought inspiration. "Beat" was slang for "beaten down" or "downtrodden". However, to Kerouac and Ginsberg, it also had a spiritual connotation, as in "[[beatitude]]". Other adjectives discussed by Holmes and Kerouac were "found" and "furtive". Kerouac felt he had identified (and was the embodiment of) a new trend analogous to the influential [[Lost Generation]].<ref>Kerouac, Jack. ''The Portable Kerouac''. Ed. [[Ann Charters]]. Penguin Classics, 2007.</ref><ref name="Hol">Holmes, John Clellon. ''Passionate Opinions: The Cultural Essays (Selected Essays By John Clellon Holmes, Vol 3)''. University of Arkansas Press, 1988. {{ISBN|1-55728-049-5}}</ref>

In "Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation", Kerouac criticized what he saw as a distortion of his visionary, spiritual ideas:

<blockquote>The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated [[hipster (1940s subculture)|hipsters]] suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way—a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word "beat" spoken on street corners on [[Times Square]] and in [[Greenwich Village|the Village]], in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America—beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant [[juvenile delinquents]], it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary [[Bartleby, the Scrivener|Bartlebies]] staring out the dead wall window of our civilization ...<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://terebess.hu/english/kerouac.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090722025344/http://terebess.hu/english/kerouac.html|url-status=dead|title=Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) Poems, Terebess Asia Online (TAO)|archive-date=July 22, 2009|website=Terebess.hu}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug00/lambert/ontheroad/response.html|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20100629214314/http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG00/lambert/ontheroad/response.html|url-status=dead|title=articlelist|archivedate=June 29, 2010|website=xroads.virginia.edu}}</ref></blockquote>

Kerouac explained what he meant by "beat" at a Brandeis Forum, "Is There A Beat Generation?", on November 8, 1958, at New York's Hunter College Playhouse. The seminar's panelists were Kerouac, [[James A. Wechsler]], Princeton anthropologist [[Ashley Montagu]] and author [[Kingsley Amis]]. Wechsler, Montagu, and Amis wore suits, while Kerouac was clad in black jeans, ankle boots and a checkered shirt. Reading from a prepared text, Kerouac reflected on his beat beginnings:

<blockquote>It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son to it ... Who knows, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.blacklistedjournalist.com/column22.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110102070709/http://blacklistedjournalist.com/column22.html|url-status=dead|title=F:\column22.html|archive-date=January 2, 2011|website=Blacklistedjournalist.com}}</ref></blockquote>

Kerouac's statement was later published as "The Origins of the Beat Generation" (''[[Playboy magazine|Playboy]]'', June 1959). In that article, Kerouac noted how his original beatific philosophy had been ignored amid maneuvers by several pundits, among them San Francisco newspaper columnist [[Herb Caen]], to alter Kerouac's concept with jokes and jargon:

<blockquote>I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"...the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific...People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, buggies, and finally, I was called the "avatar" of all this.</blockquote>

In light of what he considered beat to mean and what beatnik had come to mean, Kerouac said to a reporter "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic", showing the reporter a painting of [[Pope Paul VI]] and saying "You know who painted that? Me."