Spirituality and Religious Traditions in Beat Literature

This essay explicates a Beat fascination with esoteric religious traditions, including astrology, alchemy, and Gnosticism, illuminating heterodoxies characterizing countercultural minorities from antiquity to the present and shaping the Beat imagination. Calonne presents detailed readings of the poetry of Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, and Michael McClure

On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest

For the beat generation of the 1940s and 1950s, dissertation time is here. Magazine and newspaper critics have gotten in their jabs. Now scholars are starting to analyze the literature and legacy of the beat writers. In the last few years biographers have lined up to interpret the lives of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, and publishers have rushed into print a host of beat journals, letters, memoirs, and anthologies. The most recent Dictionary of Literary Biography devotes two large volumes to sixty-seven beat writers, including Neal Cassady, Herbert Huncke, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Lamantia, Peter Orlovsky, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen.