The Beats’ primary purpose was to eliminate, by whatever method, the false note, the borrowed tone. As writers, what they shared was an insistence on immediate experience, a constant, palpably autobiographical focus, a distrust of conventional collective solutions, a keen comic eye for the incongruous and absurd, a restless push toward the Third World margins and urban back lots of industrial civilization, and a style intimately entangled with the arts of memory, honest at all costs, always alert to the funny, sad rhythms of the particular body moving through the strangeness of space and time.
