SOURCE: Harris, Oliver. “Cold War Correspondents: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady, and the Political Economy of Beat Letters.” Twentieth Century Literature 46, no. 2 (summer 2000): 171-92.

In the following essay, Harris surveys the correspondence between three of the predominant figures in the Beat Movement and elucidates its insight into the relationship between the Cold War and Beat Movement.

On June 23, 1953, an aspiring poet employed as a copyboy for the New York World Telegram wrote a long letter to an old friend in San Jose. The letter ends by reproducing a telegraph sent to President Eisenhower protesting what David Caute has called “the midsummer's night of postwar anti-Communist, anti-Soviet hysteria” (62)—the electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the so-called atom spies: “Rosenbergs are pathetic, government Will sordid, execution obscene America caught in crucifixion machine only barbarians want them burned I say stop it before we fill our souls with death-house horror” (Ginsberg, As...