Bohemians and the Beat Movement in New York City

Baraka's writing and thinking was influenced during the late 1950s and early 1960s by a group of artists and intellectuals often referred to as the Beats or Bohemians. While many of the movement's participants considered San Francisco their home base, a large number of these artists also spent time in New York City's Greenwich Village while Baraka lived there. Gregory Corso, Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, and Allen Ginsberg—who electrified the literary world in 1955 with his experimental poem "Howl" in San Francisco—lived in and visited Greenwich Village at various times.

The Beats rebelled against typical middle-class American values through their art and rejected the conventional in all that they came across. They experimented with the form and content of poetry and prose, relying on intuition and emotions to tell them when a piece was finished. They chafed against...