can anyone tell me about literature in the 1950s, good websites, or just info, THANKSSS?

Question

PLEASSE help, i am doing a project for school and i REALLY need some info, i cant really find any good websites or book or anything so please please pleas preettttyyyyyyy please help me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thanks and remeber BEST ANSWER GETS 10 POINTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thanks agian if u help!!

Answer 1

Back in 1948, a new group of rebel-type artists formed a movement called THE BEAT GENERATION. The followers of this movement were called BEATNICKS, and they wrote many works of art throughout the 1950's. Their work represented a defiance to the politics, and lifestyle, of the time.

Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase Beat Generation sometime around 1948 to describe his friends and as a general term describing the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York at that time to the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who published an early novel about the beat generation, titled Go, in 1952, along with a manifesto of sorts in the New York Times Magazine: "This is the beat generation"). The adjective beat (introduced to the group by Herbert Huncke) had the connotations of "tired" or "down and out," but Kerouac added the paradoxical connotations of upbeat, beatific, and the musical association of being "on the beat."

Calling this relatively small group of struggling writers, students, hustlers, and drug addicts a "generation" was to make the claim that they were representative and important—the beginnings of a new trend, analogous to the influential Lost Generation.

In trying to define the "Beat Generation", it is important to note that the term was originally used to refer not only to Kerouac's inner circle, but to the burgeoning counter-culture as well. The press used the term in reference to a small group of writers, the friends of Alan Ginsberg, Kerouac, or Willian S. Burroughs, and a joke among Beat writers (attributed to both Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder) persisted in various forms: "Three friends does not make a generation." A narrow definition of the Beat Generation would include only those who consistently defined themselves as "Beat" writers: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky. If "Beat Generation" is defined broadly, the smaller group is called "The New York Beats." In this sense, movements like the San Francisco Renaissance and the Black Mountain poets would be completely separate movements. Defined broadly, (the way William Blake is defined as a Romantic poet), other writers who reached prominence in the late 1950s, early 1960s, who shared many of the same themes, ideas, intentions, etc. (for example, dedication to spontaneity, open-form composition, subjectivity, and so on), would also be included.

Answer 2

This links may help u:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/home.html
http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=literature&gwp=13