The 1950's: The Beats

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Back to San FranciscoThe 1950's: The Beats

San Francisco's reputation as a rollicking place where anything goes dates from the Barbary Coast days when gang warfare, prostitution, gambling, and drinking were major pursuits, and citizens took law and order into their own hands. Its more modern role as a catalyst for social change and the avant-garde began in the 1950s. A group of young writers, philosophers, and poets challenged the materialism and conformity of American society by embracing anarchy and Eastern philosophy, expressing their notions in poetry. They adopted a uniform of jeans, sweaters, sandals, and berets, called themselves "Beats," and hung out in North Beach, where rents were low and cheap wine was plentiful. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, to whom they were totally alien, dubbed them "beatniks" in his column.

Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac had begun writing at Columbia University in New York, but it wasn't until they came West and hooked up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and others that the movement gained national attention. The bible of the Beats was Ginsberg's "Howl," which he first read at the Six Gallery on October 13, 1955. By the time he finished reading, Ginsberg was crying, the audience was chanting, and his fellow poets were announcing the arrival of an epic bard. Ferlinghetti published "Howl," which was deemed obscene, in 1956. A trial followed, but the court found that the poem had redeeming social value, reaffirming the right of free expression. Another major Beat work, Kerouac's On the Road, was published in 1957 and instantly became a bestseller. (He had written it as one long paragraph in 20 days in 1951.) The freedom and sense of possibility the book conveyed became the bellwether for a generation.

While the Beats gave poetry readings and generated controversy, two clubs in North Beach were also making waves, notably the hungry i and the Purple Onion, where everyone who was anyone or became anyone on the entertainment scene appeared. Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce, Barbra Streisand, and Woody Allen all worked there. Maya Angelou appeared as a singer and dancer at the Purple Onion. The cafes of North Beach -- Vesuvio, Caff? Trieste, Caff? Tosca, and Enrico's Sidewalk Cafe -- were the center of bohemian life in the '50s. When the tour buses started rolling in, rents went up, and Broadway became a sex-club strip in the early 1960s. Thus ended an era, and the Beats moved on -- the alternative scene eventually shifting to Berkeley and the Haight.