Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
Beat Generation
Among the emerging novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, a few were closely connected with Beat writers, most notably Ken Kesey ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"). Though they had no direct connection, other writers considered the Beats to be a major influence, including Thomas Pynchon ("Gravity's Rainbow") and Tom Robbins ("Even Cowgirls Get the Blues").