But all this started to change in the late 1950s, as the Beats’ passionate rebellion found its voice. “The Beat Generation was a vision that we had,”6 explained Jack Kerouac in Aftermath, “of a generation of crazy illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America . . . characters of a special spirituality . . . staring out the dead wall window of our civilization.” Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem7 Howl was a shout out that same window: a free-verse rant about the need to break loose from social constraint via direct, primal experience.
