Beat movement, also called Beat Generation, American social and literary movement

originating in the 1950s and centering in the bohemian artist communities of San Francisco’s
North Beach, Los Angeles’ Venice West, and New York City’s Greenwich Village. Its
adherents, self-styled as “beat” (originally meaning “weary,” but later also connoting a musical
sense, a “beatific” spirituality, and other meanings) and derisively called “beatniks,” expressed
their alienation from conventional, or “square,” society by adopting an almost uniform style of
seedy dress, manners, and “hip” vocabulary borrowed from jazz musicians. Generally apolitical
and indifferent to social problems, they advocated personal release, purification, and illumination
through the heightened sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or the
disciplines of Zen Buddhism. Apologists for the Beats, among them Paul Goodman, found the
joylessness and purposelessness of modern society sufficient justification for both withdrawal
and protest.

Beat poets sought to liberate poetry from academic preciosity and bring it “back to the
streets.” They read their poetry, sometimes to the accompaniment of progressive jazz, in such
Beat strongholds as the Coexistence Bagel Shop and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights
bookstore in San Francisco. The verse was frequently chaotic and liberally sprinkled with
obscenities but was sometimes, as in the case of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), ruggedly
powerful and moving. Ginsberg and other major figures of the movement, such as the novelist
Jack Kerouac, advocated a kind of free, unstructured composition in which the writer put down
his thoughts and feelings without plan or revision—to convey the immediacy of experience—an
approach that led to the production of much undisciplined and incoherent verbiage on the part of
their imitators. By about 1960, when the faddish notoriety of the movement had begun to fade, it
had produced a number of interesting and promising writers, including Ferlinghetti, Gregory
Corso, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder, and had paved the way for acceptance of other
unorthodox and previously ignored writers, such as the Black Mountain poets and the novelist
William Burroughs.

George Saunders, the graduated student of Oak Forest High School who was born in December
2, 1958 in Texas, U.S, well-known of the absurdity of consumerism, corporate culture, and the
role of mass media in most of his works. One of his works which is Victory Lap (2009), the story
is tells about violence that happened in family environment that the writer tried to describe as a
critique to the New Yorker issues in contemporary period. The needs of human rights at that time
has been influenced the contemporary author to attract people.