They have tended to be bohemian, counter-culture intellectuals who disassociated themselves from universities and outspokenly critized bourgeois American society. Their poetry is daring, original and sometimes shocking. In its search for new values, it claims affinity with the archaic world of myth, legend, and traditional societies such as those of the American Indian.
Beat Poets:
They emerged in 1950s. Most of the important beatniks migrated to San Francisco from the east coast, gaining their initial national recognition in California. Major beat writers have included Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Beat poetry is oral, repetitive and immensely effective in readings, largely because it developed out of poetry readings in underground clubs. Beat poetry was the most antiestablishment form of literature in the United States, but beneath its shocking words lies a love of country. The poetry is a cry of pain and rage at what the poets see as the loss of America´s innocence and the tragic waste of its human and material resources. Poems like Allen Ginsberg´s Howl revolutionized traditional poetry.

Eight chapter – American prose since 1945: realism and
experimentation.

Narrative since World War II. resists generalization: It is extremely various and multifaceted. It has been vitalized by international currents such as European existentialism and Latin American magical realism, while the electronic era has brought the global village. The spoken word on television has given new life to oral tradition. Writers in the United States are asking serious questions, many of them of a metaphysical nature. Writers have become highly innovate and self-aware or reflexive. Often they find traditional modes ineffective and seek vitality in more widely popular material.
JEROME DAVID SALINGER (1919 – ):
J.D. Salinger has portrayed attempts to drop out of society- Born in New York City he achieved huge literary success with the publication of his novel The Catcher in the Rye. Centred on a sensitive 16-year-old boy, Holden Caufield, who flees his elite boarding school for the outside world of adulthood, only to become disillusioned by its materialism and phoniness. When asked what he would like to be, Caufield answers “the catcher in the rye” misquoting a poem by Robert Burns. In his vision, he is a modern version of a white knight, the sole preserver of innocence. He imagines a big field of rye so tall that a group of young children cannot see where they are running as they play their games. He is the only big person there.