San Francisco Renaissance - The Beats

The Beats

Around the same time that Duncan, Spicer and Blaser were at Berkeley, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch were attending Reed College in Portland together. These three, along with Kirby Doyle, a native San Franciscan, were to form the nucleus of the West Coast wing of the Beat Generation.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti had been studying for a doctorate at the Sorbonne and, while in Paris, he met Kenneth Rexroth, who later persuaded him to go to San Francisco to experience the growing literary scene there. Between 1951 and 1953 Ferlinghetti taught French, wrote literary criticism, and painted. In 1953, he and a business partner established the City Lights Bookstore and started publishing from City Lights Press two years later.

Snyder and Whalen, along with Michael McClure, were among the poets who performed at the famous Six Gallery poetry reading that Kenneth Rexroth organized in San Francisco on October 13 (or October 7, sources vary), 1955. This reading signaled the full emergence of the San Francisco Renaissance into the public consciousness and helped establish the city's reputation as a center for countercultural activity that came to full flower during the hippie years of the 1960s. A short fictional account of this event forms the second chapter of Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. In the account he describes Allen Ginsberg's famous reading of his poem "Howl". Kerouac and Ginsberg had attended the reading with some of their poet friends.