The Beats were members of a small literary movement that started in the homosexual and bohemian enclaves of San Francisco and New York in the early 1950s. The movement produced great works that changed American culture, such as Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. The word “beat,” with origins in drug and jazz culture, originally meant “robbed,” and came to mean, for these writers, “The world is against me.”41 Ginsberg noted that “the point of beat is that you get beaten down to a certain nakedness where you are actually able to
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