The desire to liverate self-expression and reject middle-class conventions also animated a small but highly visible and controversial group of young writers, poets, painters, and musicians known as the Beats.
The Beats were not lost in dispair, though they strenuously embrassed life. But it was life on their own terms, and their terms were shocking to most observers. They sought personal rather than social solutions to their hopes and anxieties.
They were not beat in the sense of beaten; they were "mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved."
Their road to salvation lay in hallucinogenic drugs and alcohol, sex, an affinity for