Jack Kerouak ( on the right ) with Neil Cassady

      Jack Kerouak, along with William Burroughs and Alan Ginsburg is credited with creating the beat generation. These three and others were the literary leaders of an underground sub-culture in New York City during and after World War II. This culture was one of narcotics, uninhibited sex, a philosophical fascination with crime, and personal freedom in a time (1940s) when society was much less tolerant than today. New York City during World War II was the last stop in the U.S. for soldiers going to Europe. The powers that be quietly tolerated this underground sub-culture of vice and sin that these young soldiers, who quite rightly did not expect to return, indulged in before they took ship for Europe and the most terrible of wars.
      In the years following the war Kerouak and friends loosely formalized this lifestyle in their writings culminating in Kerouak naming it the Beat Generation and his book On the Road. The Beatnik culture evolved into the counterculture hippie movement of the sixties which became the media named me decade of the seventies which has bizarrely turned into the compulsive pursuit of wealth of the last twenty years, the pursuers of which credulously believe such wealth will give them the freedom they spent the sixties philosophizing about. ( sigh )
      And now the new century has seen this same school of thought create a depraved elitism based on the remnants of the beat generation culture mixed in with outragous distortions of philosphies like Freidrech Nietzsche And Darwin?s Evolution; all of which is clearly a self-serving justification for past errors and the betrayal of family, friends, and anything or anyone else that interferes with the puerile and insatiable catering to their adolescent whims and desires.
      The Jack Kerouak and Beat Generation web sites do not begin to do justice to their subject matter , so I have not even bothered to put any links here.