These young rebels did not so much want to learn, thought Hal Chase, a member of the group, as “they wanted to emote, to soak up the world.” They aspired to become, as Allen Ginsberg put it, “intelligent, Melvillean street wanderers of the night.” Several of them were to become writers: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes, whose first book, Go, is often called the first Beat novel. The initial response from straight society was to try to send them to psychiatrists: Burroughs believed that the healthier you were, the more the straight world, which he considered inherently
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