Beat Generation
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The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
A section devoted to the beat generation at a bookstore in Stockholm, Sweden
Image: Burroughs 1983 crop b
Image: Allen Ginsberg 1979 cropped
Silent Generation
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The Silent Generation, also known as the Traditionalist Generation, is the Western demographic cohort following the Greatest Generation and preceding the baby boomers. The generation is generally defined as people born from 1928 to 1945. By this definition and U.S. Census data, there were 23 million Silents in the United States as of 2019.
Child evacuees in Reading, the children are carrying Gas masks which were issued to British civilians in 1938 during the Munich Crisis (1940)
Early television, an example of mid-20th century consumer goods
Houses adapted for elderly people in Omagh, Northern Ireland (2010)