A Literary Protest.

The Beats were members of an artistic protest movement in the mid 1950s in which a small group of writers declared themselves disaffected nonconformists and were elevated by the media to the status of antiheroes. GO! (1952), by John Clellon Holmes, is said to be the first Beat novel because it is a lightly disguised account of the lives of key Beat figures — Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg. In the novel, as in real life, they consider themselves to be moral pioneers, turning their backs on materialism, and the values that support it, in favor of adventuresome lives given purpose by the search for meaning. GO! is valued much more highly by literary historians, who consider it documentary evidence of the early days of the movement, than by contemporary audiences, who were largely uninterested, if sales are a...