Politics & Power Quote by John Clellon Holmes

Holmes punctures the Beat myth with a pin he helped sharpen. As the writer who popularized the term in a 1952 New York Times Magazine piece, he’s not an outsider sneering at Kerouac and company; he’s the movement’s uneasy inside editor, watching it calcify into a brand. The phrase “so-called” is the tell: a defensive shrug at how quickly “Beat Generation” became a label that promised instant cool, then got sold back as lifestyle. Holmes refuses the romance of a coherent “generation” and replaces it with something messier and more democratizing: “a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities.” That’s not just inclusivity; it’s a quiet rebuke to later caricatures that reduce the Beats to a narrow, mostly white, male clique.

Then comes the blunt punchline, “society sucked,” a deliberate downshift from literary gravitas to barroom clarity. It’s a strategy: deflate the sacred aura, reclaim the movement’s original emotional fuel. Holmes frames the Beats less as avant-garde aesthetes than as a coalition of disaffection, united by a shared revulsion at postwar American normalcy: conformity, corporate life, Cold War paranoia, sanitized prosperity. The subtext is that the Beats weren’t born from a doctrine so much as a pressure cooker. Their styles differed, their backgrounds varied, but the negative consensus came first: the prevailing script felt false, and opting out was both critique and survival.

Holmes’s intent lands as a corrective: stop fetishizing the Beats as prophets; understand them as people responding, sometimes crudely, to a culture that left too little room to breathe.