09/22/2026
Lawrence certainly nailed it 20+ years ago.
“From the start, the Beat writers were dissidents. They were outsiders.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti said this in 1995, when asked about the Beat Generation by a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner. He continued:
“Beat is far from a dead movement. Many of the writers and artists are still producing. […] It’s a continuing movement, and the art often has this primitive, visceral quality, but it’s part of a revolt. In the ‘50s, it was a revolt against the deadening times of the McCarthy era, and those times were similar to what we have today in a lot of ways with the reactionary government we have now.”
Like Michael McClure sometimes did, Ferlinghetti went on to claim that other apparently distinct groups were in fact merely wings of a wider Beat movement:
“Beat is the only revolution around. I don’t see any other movement still alive. The feminists are part of Beat, and in a way the environmentalists. It’s sad to say that the intellectuals are otherwise strangely absent.”
Finally, he says something more relevant now than ever. It is a quote that could well have been uttered in 2026 rather than 1995. He says:
“The Beat mind is already looking at the next Cold War, the war against computers. It’s a war by humans against the nonhumans.”
