[durasell]

The Beat Generation were unashamedly pro-American. They fancied themselves the offspring of Whitman and celebrate the American landscape.

The sixties saw the simultaneous mass marketing of the "hep cat" and perceived disallusionment with the status quo.

[Austin Willard Wright]

You are absolutely right. I read (actually listened) to a "On the Road" a couple of years ago and it was a hymn to American landscape, as you suggest. It is the perfectly book to listen to when traveling cross country by car. Kerowac was an acerbic critic of socialism and statism (as was Burroughs).

[madprof98]

The Beat Generation certainly were Whitmanesque in the onanistic sense: total self-absorption was their primary value, and that became the one and only value of the generation they spawned. Ever read Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare? It's supposedly one of George W. Bush's favorite books, and it really gets both the Fifties and the Sixties right.

[O.C. - Old Cracker]

Ah yes, the Beat Generation produced such giants as Allen Ginsberg, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. More akin to trolls than giants.

[Dr. Eckleburg]

Fancy meeting you on a literature thread. 8~)

The sixties saw the simultaneous mass marketing of the "hep cat" and perceived disallusionment with the status quo.

I think that began in the 50's as the men who came home from WWII and Korea starting working in movies and TV.

The latter 60's were a direct result of the Pill, the Viet Nam War, and drugs.

I'm glad to see "Catcher in the Rye" receiving negative reviews. While the writing style is good, often close to poetic, the deeper implications of the book (especially when given to adolescents) are rancid -- that a 16-year-old cannot survive in society because it abandons him, sexualizes him (the advances of his homosexual teacher) and finally dumps him in a mental institution.

While this is a viable cautionary tale for parents not to ignore their kids, it's a terrible book to give to impressionable 14-year-olds who will identify with Holden's schizophrenia.

I started questioning this book for students when my H.S. freshman son had to read "The Collector." A competently-written, but lurid and grotesque book. To what end? To tell kids we are all held captive to a depraved world?

They can get that from "Will & Grace."