The Fifties

by David Halberstam

Their name, the Beats, was borrowed from Herbert Huncke, a Times Square thief and male prostitute, who had used the word beat in regular conversation. As Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee note in Jack’s Book, an oral biography of Kerouac, the word came from the drug culture and has special meaning: “cheated, robbed or emotionally or physically exhausted.” Later, the definition was reinvented by Kerouac to mean “beatific,” to describe those who went against the prevailing tide of materialism and personal ambition. Malcolm Cowley, the distinguished editor and critic, more sympathetic to them than critics at the time, wrote that they were “looking for something to believe, an essentially religious faith that would permit them to live at peace with their world.” It was no small irony that the magic ingredient that allowed them to forgo regular jobs and still manage reasonably comfortable lives was the sheer affluence of the mainstream culture that they so disdained; the country was so rich that even those who chose not to play by its rules were protected.