In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the writers of the Beat Generation revolutionized American literature with their iconoclastic approach to language and their angry assault on the conformity and conservatism of postwar society.
Sterritt has appeared as a guest on CBS Morning News, Nightline, Charlie Rose, CNN Live Today, Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The O\'Reilly Factor, among many other television and radio shows..
His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Huffington Post, Journal of American History, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Beliefnet, Chronicle of Higher Education , and many other publications.
His books include Mad to Be Saved: The Beats, the \'50s, and Film and Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility , and he serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Beat Studies .
A noted critic, author, and scholar, he is chair of the National Society of Film Critics and chief book critic of Film Quarterly , and was for many years the film critic for The Christian Science Monitor .
About the Author: David Sterritt is a film professor at Columbia University and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and professor emeritus at Long Island University.
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This compact Introduction explains why.
More than half a century later, the Beats\' impact can still be felt in literature, cinema, music, theater, and the visual arts.
This book explains how the Beats used their antiauthoritarian visions and radical styles to challenge dominant values, fending off absorption into mainstream culture while preparing ground for the larger, more explosive social upheavals of the 1960s.
The idea was to revolutionize society by revolutionizing thought, not the other way around.
Yet they urged the remaking of consciousness on a profoundly inward-looking basis, cultivating "the unspeakable visions of the individual," in Kerouac\'s phrase.
Members of the Beat Generation hoped that their radical rejection of materialism, consumerism, and regimentation would inspire others to purify their lives and souls as well.
As Sterritt ranges from Greenwich Village and San Francisco to Mexico, western Europe, and North Africa, he sheds much light on how the Beats approached literature, drugs, sexuality, art, music, and religion.
Figures in the saga include Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Clellon Holmes, Carolyn Cassady, and Gary Snyder.
In this Very Short Introduction, David Sterritt offers a concise overview of the social, cultural, and aesthetic sensibilities of the Beats, bringing out the similarities that connected them and also the many differences that made them a loosely knit collective rather than an organized movement.
Burroughs\'s Naked Lunch (1959).
They and their followers took aim at the hypocrisy and taboos of their time--particularly those involving sex, race, and class--in such provocative works as Jack Kerouac\'s On the Road (1957), Allen Ginsberg\'s "Howl" (1956), and William S.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the writers of the Beat Generation revolutionized American literature with their iconoclastic approach to language and their angry assault on the conformity and conservatism of postwar society
