The Times Square Underworld

Burroughs had long had an interest in experimenting with criminal behavior, and gradually made contacts in the criminal underground of New York, becoming involved with dealing in stolen goods and narcotics and developing a decades long addiction to opiates. Burroughs met Herbert Huncke, a small-time criminal and drug addict who often hung around the Times Square area.

The beats found Huncke a fascinating character. As Ginsberg put it, they were on a quest for "supreme reality", and somehow felt that Huncke, as a member of the underclass had learned things they were sheltered from in their middle/upper-middle class lives.

Various problems resulted from this association: In 1949 Ginsberg was in trouble with the law (his apartment was packed with stolen goods, he had been riding in a car full of stolen goods, and so on). He pleaded insanity and was briefly committed to Bellevue, where he met Carl Solomon. When committed Carl Solomon was more eccentric than psychotic — a fan of Antonin Artaud, he indulged in some self-consciously "crazy" behavior, e.g. throwing potato salad at a lecturer on Dadaism. Ted Morgan also mentions an incident where he stole a peanut butter sandwich in a cafeteria, and showed it to a security guard. If not crazy when he was admitted, Solomon was arguably driven mad by the insulin shock treatments applied at Bellevue, and this is one of the things referred to in Ginsberg's poem "Howl" (which was dedicated to Carl Solomon). After his release, Solomon became the publishing contact that agreed to publish Burroughs' first novel Junky (1953) shortly before another episode resulted in him being committed again.

Neal Cassady

The introduction of Neal Cassady into the scene in 1947 had a number of effects. A number of the beats were enthralled with Cassady — Ginsberg had an affair with him; and Kerouac's road trips with him in the late 40s became a focus of his second novel, On the Road. Cassady is one of the sources of "rapping" - the loose spontaneous babble that later became associated with "beatniks" (see below). He was not much of a writer himself, though the core writers of the group were impressed with the free-flowing style of some of his letters, and Kerouac cited this as a key influence on his invention of the spontaneous prose style/technique that he used in his key works (the other obvious influence being the improvised solos of Jazz music). On the Road, written somewhat in this style, transformed Cassady (under the name "Dean Moriarty") into a cultural icon: a hyper wildman, frequently broke- going from woman to woman, car to car, town to town; largely amoral, but frantically engaged with life.

The time lags involved in the publication of Kerouac's On the Road often creates confusion: It was written in 1952 — shortly after John Clellon Holmes published "Go", and the article "This is the beat generation" — and it covered events that took place much earlier, beginning in the late 40s. Since the book was not published until 1957, many people received the impression that it was describing the late '50s era, though it was actually a document of a time ten years earlier.

The legend of how "On the Road" was written was as influential as the book itself: high on speed, Kerouac typed rapidly on a continuous scroll of telegraph paper to avoid having to break his chain of thought at the end of each sheet of paper. Kerouac's dictum was that "the first thought is best thought", and insisted that you should never revise text after it is written — though there remains some question about how carefully Kerouac observed this rule. Although Kerouac maintained he wrote this particular book in one mad 3-week burst, it is clear from manuscript evidence that he had previously written several drafts and had been contemplating the novel for years. Also, the text went through many changes between the final "roll" manuscript and the published version- more evidence to suggest Kerouac's deviation from his dictum- although, to be fair, he had written the book before devising this code.

Gregory Corso

In 1950 Gregory Corso met Ginsberg, who was impressed by the poetry Corso had written while incarcerated for burglary. Gregory Corso was the young d'Artagnan added to the original three of the core beat writers, and for decades the four were often spoken of together; though later critical attention for Corso (the least prolific of the four) waned. Corso's first book The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems appeared in 1955.