50s literature

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Page 1: 50s Literature
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They were the first to protest what they considered to be the blandness, conformity, and lack of serious social and cultural purpose in middle-class life in

America. If much of the rest of the nation was enthusiastically joining the great migration to the suburbs, they consciously rejected this new life of middle-class affluence and were creating a new,

alternative life-style; they were the pioneers of what would eventually become the counterculture. If

other young people of their generation glorified in getting married, having children, owning property

and cars, and socializing with neighbors like themselves, these young men saw suburbia as a

prison…

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…Their protest would have significant political implications, but its con They wanted no future of guaranteed pensions but instead sought freedom—freedom to pick up and go across the country at a

moment’s notice, if they so chose. They saw themselves as poets in a land of philistines, men

seeking spiritual destinies rather than material ones. tent was essentially social and cultural. The politics of the era had little meaning for them, and they saw

little difference between the two main parties.

From The Fifties, David Halberstam

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ALLEN GINSBERGJACK KEROUAC

THE BEAT GENERATION

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"Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but

Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.

"I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much

to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him."

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Other Writers Who Challenged the Norm

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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads

you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they

approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination indeed, everything except me.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of

trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.