Editing Beat Generation (section)

==Criticism==
The Beat Generation was met with scrutiny and assigned many stereotypes. Several magazines, including ''[[Life (magazine)|Life]]'' and ''[[Playboy]],'' depicted members of the Beat Generation as [[Nihilism|nihilists]] and as unintellectual. This criticism was largely due to the ideological differences between American culture at the time and the Beat Generation, including their [[Buddhist]]-inspired beliefs.<ref name=":0" />

[[Norman Podhoretz]], a student at Columbia with Kerouac and Ginsberg, later became a critic of the Beats. His 1958 ''[[Partisan Review]]'' article "The Know-Nothing Bohemians" was a vehement critique primarily of Kerouac's ''On the Road'' and ''The Subterraneans,'' as well as Ginsberg's ''Howl''.<ref>Collected in ''The Norman Podhoretz Reader'' by Norman Podhoretz, Thomas L. Jeffers, Paul Johnson. Free Press, 2007. {{ISBN|978-1-4165-6830-8}}.</ref> His central criticism is that the Beat's embrace of spontaneity is bound up in an anti-intellectual worship of the "primitive" that can easily turn toward mindlessness and violence. Podhoretz asserted that there was a link between the Beats and criminal delinquents.{{Citation needed|date= February 2018}}

Ginsberg responded in a 1958 interview with ''[[The Village Voice]]'',<ref>In: ''Spontaneous Mind''.</ref> specifically addressing the charge that the Beats destroyed "the distinction between life and literature". In the interview, he stated that "the bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are 'Intellectuals' and there are intellectuals. Podhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now—[[Marcel Proust|Proust]], [[Thomas Wolfe|Wolfe]], [[William Faulkner|Faulkner]], [[James Joyce|Joyce]]."<ref>Ginsberg, Allen, ''Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958–1996,'' p. 5, {{ISBN|0-06-093082-9}}.</ref>

===Internal criticism===
In a 1974 interview,<ref name="Knight, Arthur Winfield 1987">Knight, Arthur Winfield. Ed. ''The Beat Vision'' (1987), Paragon House. {{ISBN|0-913729-40-X}}; {{ISBN|0-913729-41-8}} (pbk).</ref> [[Gary Snyder]] comments on the subject of "casualties" of the Beat Generation:<ref name="Charters01">Charters (2001) ''Beat Down to Your Soul''.</ref>

<blockquote style="font-size:100%">Kerouac was a casualty too. And there were many other casualties that most people have never heard of, but were genuine casualties. Just as, in the 60s, when Allen and I for a period there were almost publicly recommending people to take acid. When I look back on that now I realize there were many casualties, and responsibilities to bear.</blockquote>

When the Beats initially set out to "construct" new communities that shirked conformity and traditionalism, they invoked the symbols of the most marginalized ethnic identities of their time. As the reality set in, of racial self-identity lost within the communal constructs of their own making, most of the Beat writers altered their message drastically to acknowledge the social impulse to marginalize the self in the conflict between isolationism and absorption of self by communal instincts seeking belonging. They began to deeply engage with new themes such as the place of the white man in America and declining patriarchal institutions.<ref>{{cite book |last=Martinez |first=Manuel Luis |title=Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera |publisher=University of Wisconsin Press |year=2003 | pages=52 |isbn=9780299192839 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PetNsyuGKAMC}}</ref>