The Beats … funny you should ask about the significance of their work, because I've recently been thinking the same thing. The Beats were the rebels of my father's generation and as I grew up provided guidance towards of a life beyond the stultifying cultural desert of Nixon suburbia. I continue to read and reread them as part of my literary input and have just finished Burrough's later trilogy Red Nights/Dead Roads/Western Lands after perhaps twenty years last, and wondering … will these dudes have anything to say to the future? Or, it would seem, to the present?
Earlier in the year I read several of Bowles' volumes, including this one on travel writing I hadn't seen before. What a lost world it all is - and yet it's redolent of a spirit that endures; the celebrity narcissist. It portrays a fantasy world I guess we all harbour in our inner desires, maybe.
Burroughs' cosmology was immensely influential of my personal development in formulating my thinking as to the relationship between myself and the world, and in may ways beneficial in demonstrating the risks of addiction, the nature of power and social control, and the compulsive nature of sexual desires. But whether all this is going to endure into a future of mass ADD remains to me very much an open question.
Inevitably time weeds out the dross and it very well may be the lasting significance of many of the Beats like Kerouac and Ginsberg will be more their influence on the younger generation of the 60s and 70s rather than their literary qualities.
Looking at their equivalents from their previous generation, say Wilder or Prokosch or Norman Douglas (just to pick a few randomly), are any of these still read today?
