The Wire: The Go-To Destination for All Things Beat Generation
The Beat Museum in San Francisco houses items that help understand the seminal influence that Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky and others had.
Sidharth Bhatia, writing for India’s The Wire, visits the Beat Museum in this great article:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…”
The poet Allen Ginsberg first read out these lines from his poem ‘Howl’ at a reading at the Six Gallery in December 1955. The reading was an immediate success and nearly 65 years on, the lines still resonate and the influence of Ginsberg, then 29, still continues on literature, social movements, popular culture and politics.
The Beat Generation – the literary movement formed by Ginsberg and his fellow writers such as Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, William Burroughs and Lucien Carr – which explored post-war culture and set the stage of much that came later, including hippies and the quest for spiritualism which brought many to India.