A report on Beat Generation and The Dharma Bums
The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac.
- The Dharma BumsThe Six Gallery reading informs the second chapter of Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, whose chief protagonist is "Japhy Ryder", a character who is actually based on Gary Snyder.
- Beat Generation7 related topics with Alpha
Gary Snyder
5 linksAmerican man of letters.
American man of letters.
This period provided the materials for Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums, and Snyder was the inspiration for the novel's main character, Japhy Ryder, in the same way Neal Cassady had inspired Dean Moriarty in On the Road.
In the 1950s, Snyder took part in the rise of a strand of Buddhist anarchism emerging from the Beat movement.
Six Gallery reading
5 linksImportant poetry event that took place on Friday, October 7, 1955, at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco.
Important poetry event that took place on Friday, October 7, 1955, at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco.
Conceived by Wally Hedrick, this event was the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation and helped to herald the West Coast literary revolution that continued the San Francisco Renaissance.
Still, Kerouac was able to recall much of what occurred at the reading, and wrote an account that he included in his novel The Dharma Bums.
Allen Ginsberg
4 linksAmerican poet and writer.
American poet and writer.
As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation.
An account of that night can be found in Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums, describing how change was collected from audience members to buy jugs of wine, and Ginsberg reading passionately, drunken, with arms outstretched.
Jack Kerouac
3 links
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
In response, Kerouac chronicled parts of his own experience with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco-area poets, in The Dharma Bums, set in California and Washington and published in 1958.
Kenneth Rexroth
3 linksAmerican poet, translator, and critical essayist.
American poet, translator, and critical essayist.
Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine.
Years after the Six Gallery reading, Time referred to him as "Father of the Beats. Rexroth ostensibly appears in Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums as Reinhold Cacoethes.
Philip Whalen
3 linksPhilip Glenn Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002) was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.
He appears, in barely fictionalized form, as the character "Warren Coughlin" in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, which includes an account of that reading.
Michael McClure
1 linksAmerican poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist.
American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist.
After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955, which was rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums.
He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and was immortalized as Pat McLear in Kerouac's Big Sur.