Biography Essay

In discarding accepted notions of conformity in art as well as life, the Beats looked around for brothers of rebellion. Breaking the dam of cultural convention they stood on new and fertile ground and recognized as their predecessors other innovators: the romantics, the symbolists, the surrealists, the rebels of Greenwich Village and San Francisco, writers like William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Walt Whitman, Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Antonin Artaud, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and Thomas Wolfe. Then they looked closer at older peers, writers like Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Henry Miller, and one particular beacon light standing at land's end in San Francisco—Lawrence Ferlinghetti. No one better represents the various currents that emerged into the Beat movement in San Francisco's mid 1950s than this very hip Homer of the streets. Described by some as the most truly "beat" of the Beats...