Think of the Beat Generation, the group of poets, artists, and original hipsters who went on the road in the 1950s, and a certain picture emerges: young literary outlaws driving across America, smoking marijuana and rejecting middle class culture. Lead by Jack Kerouac, whose book On the Road is considered an American classic, the Beats included free-spirited outsiders like Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They were sexually promiscuous, loved jazz, did drugs, and practiced a syncretism of various religions. The Beats, it is popularly thought, had no coherent philosophy other than freedom and a rejection of the square world that they inherited.
But what if that picture is incomplete, or even false? In the new book Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats, Robert Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English, California State Polytechnic University, argues that the Beat Generation have been turned into “pop culture icons,” and that “a moribund nostalgia threatens to recast these serious religious writers into icons of pop-culture hedonism.” The Beats, offers Inchausti, were among “the most important spiritual writers of the last half the twentieth century.”
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