Influence of the 'Beats'

• Acclaimed writers

  Ginsberg & Kerouac were highly influential in literacy circles
• Initially the 'beats' were a media sensation but after 1960 the media lost interests
• Several 'beat' followers who subsequently gained fame for their oppositional stance

  • singer songwriter Bob Dylan
  • Tom Hayden
  • Doctor Timothy Leary- Harvard psychologist who experimented on his students with drugs
• Superficial version of the 'beats'

  Developed in colleges, became fashionable for young people to adopt an anti-establishment attitude
• Beatniks


  From 1958 they were known as the beatniks, genuine 'beats' had little time for them, although he became 'King of the Beatniks'- Kerouac considered beatniks pretentious copycats