Part I : The Hippie Movement

A) From the Beat Generation to the Beatniks The Beat Generation's birth occurred in the 50's, in the USA., with an international context marked by the Second World War and, after it, by the Cold War. The USA was, at this time, engaged in an affirmation of its model, advocating its capitalist system represented, in the country, by a growing bourgeois population and by a conservative society.

It is in this America that begins the literature, social, and cultural movement of the Beat Generation, from a four men's friendship: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady , and William Burroughs. Their encounter took place between 1944 and 1946, in New York, and more exactly in the city of Greenwich Village, by the intervention of Lucien Carr, a charismatic character taken as a model by the bohemia who haunts the city's bars, and of Hal Chase, a student of Columbia University .
Jack Kerouac, native of Massachusetts, and French-speaking, is, in1944, a young man who, because of an accident, had to stop a sportive career and who devotes himself to writing. Writer too, Allen Ginsberg is the son of a poet and a communist activist, homosexual he proclaims his marginality and his social exclusion as “poet, Jew, drug-addict, and queer”. Their meeting occurs in 1944, followed rapidly by William Burroughs' one, the principal speaker of Lucien Carr, who will fascinate them by his shady dandyism. In fact, the latter is the son of a manufacturer, who, fascinated by junkies, louts and criminal, gives up his bourgeois life in the Missouri to come to New York, in order to associate with disreputable individuals. One of them is Herbert Huncke , a junkie, who initiates Burroughs to drug and brings in the future beats' life, the expression” to be beat” meaning for him “ to be damned”. The encounter with the fourth character of what will form the original heart of the Beat Generation, happens in 1994, thanks to Hal Chase who keeps in