Burroughs young people from towns were feeling limited and therefore they started to move to San Francisco, New York and New Orleans and they began to live a bohemian life there. Jack Kerouac described the feelings from New York in his novella Pic:
“When I seed New York was from that bus, and Slim poked me up from the seat and said ‘Here we are in New York’ and I looked and the sun was red all over, […] I jess could barely see a whole heap of walls and lanky steeples way, way off yonder all cloudy inside the smoke...”
At the end of 1948, the first version of On the Road was written but it didn’t find its publisher until 1957. This book became something like the Bible of the beat generation and even for young people who wanted somehow to revolt. James Dean, Elvis Presley and Jack Kerouac represented the destroying of commonplaces about sex, family, race, rationalism and faith. This gave a new sense for freedom and independence. Sal Paradise expresses it in the introduction to On the Road: “I was young writer and I wanted to take off. Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me” The heroes refuse to submit to the traditional values, career, marriage and properties. In short, On the Road is about looking for a soul in America.
The next guru of the beat generation was Allen Ginsberg. Together with Kerouac, they became the symbols of liberators of America because they were interested in ecology, old civilizations, freedom of speech and homosexual orientation. On the other hand, “the adversaries of beatniks opposed that this is the beginning of demoralizing process which leads to drug addiction, AIDS, promiscuity, disintegration of family, sectarianism, increase of criminality, pornography and contempt for authorities.”
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This significant movement has influenced many people who have been trying to live like the beatniks. The most famous of them is Bob Dylan, the friend of Allen Ginsberg who introduced him the work of Arthur Rimbaud. For some people it may be surprising that the Beatles played at a poetry party of the London poet Royston Ellis and some literary scientists claim that the name Beatles comes exactly from the beatniks because John Lennon was a big fan of them. Naturally, the rebels of nowadays confess that the beat generation and their thoughts have influenced them. Maybe the most popular person, who declares his support for beatniks, is Johnny Depp, the famous actor. In the year 1994, he bought the old Kerouac’s coat for $10 000.