Year: 2025
Type: dataset
Abstract: his influence: the power for brief, vague snatches of his songs to become rallying cries.This power came from his special position within the Sixties counterculture, a position he eventually rejected, sardonically speaking of "rogue radicals looking for the Prince of Protest" (Chronicles 116).The Prince of Protest idea-rising to a prominent position in counterculture before rejecting that position-traces back to Sixties counterculture's direct ancestor: the Beat Generation.The Beat Generation was a group of writers who were propelled into the public spotlight after the publication of On the Road by Jack Kerouac (who would later be called "the King of the Beats") in 1957.On the Road was a semi-fictionalized memoir that followed Sal Paradise, an alter-ego of Kerouac, who traveled across America in search of some missing part of his life-alternatively love, family, and the spirit of America itself.It was a book that gave literary merit to many of the ideas prominent with youth at the time.It appealed to a generation raised with the release of Rebel Without a Cause and James Dean's premature death as culturally significant events, a generation that felt tragic despite the economic prosperity of the time and, in the face of looming nuclear destruction, had the desire to both act out and find themselves.When Kerouac began making university appearances in 1958, he was further entrenching himself as a leading figure in the burgeoning youth movement, and in 1959 he tentatively called himself "the spokesman of the Beat Generation" (Portable Kerouac 567).But by 1961, he was largely disillusioned with youth culture.In his book Big Sur, he describes the effects of his house becoming a hipster's Mecca, with "teenagers jumping the six-foot fence that I'd had built in my yard for privacy" and "drunken visitors puking in my study, stealing books and even pencils" (2).People would show up expecting to find Jack Duluoz, one of Kerouac's pseudonyms, and be disappointed by Kerouac's actual appearance.As one intruder said, "I'm not going to ask if
Author: Weisner, Burke Smoak
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4409742604