ABSTRACT
Discussions of the beat generation remind me very much of blind men trying to tell what an elephant is like. This is so because on the one hand so many of those discussing the beat generation really don't know what they are talking about, and on the other because the beat generation itself is a very complex animal. It is a generation which consists of jazz festivals, Zen Buddhism, peyote, a return to Catholicism, early marriage, no marriage, marijuana, street gangs, poetry, and general confusion. It is therefore both a safe and a dangerous subject to treat with. Safe in that anything you say will be partly true, and dangerous in that anything you say will be correctly termed an over-simplification.
