ABSTRACT
The beatniks originated many of the dreariest features of the cultural fads of the 1960s and after. The beatniks were associated with the rise of the drug culture, which, though it long remained on a very small scale, had begun to develop at least as far back as the 1940s. The Beats themselves were not treated with much respect in the 1950s yet, perhaps luckily for them, were often then presented to the general public in a curiously sanitized fashion. They were harshly criticized in intellectual circles, not only by the conservative-minded, but also by liberals and even leftists such as John Ciardi, James Wechsler, and most bitingly, by Norman Podhoretz. There was a growing feeling of discontent in the ideas of those intellectuals who condemned the existing social order, not as politically or economically oppressive, but as Richard Pells put it, because it seemed "impersonal, bureaucratic and inhumane".
