Redefining the American Dream

The financial prosperity experienced by the United States in the years following the Second World War created a new American identity. A television in the living room, a Cadillac in the driveway, one boy, one girl, a wife in the kitchen, and Rex by the fireplace. This is the stereotypical, conservative family of the 1950s whose existence was not without a counterpart. A radical reaction to the conformity and ignorance of the post-war era, later christened "the Beats", sprung up across America. This sparse movement of roaming vagabonds, their experience both captured and defined by such immortal writers as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, utterly rejected the values and ideals of middle class America. Beat literature drastically redefined the American Dream to one which valued individuality and the deeper meaning derived from life experience by popularizing and glorifying anti-heroes who hold closely and act on the Beat ideal.…