The Beat Ecologies of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac

Chapter Four develops the previous chapter’s investigation into the substantial influence of translated Chinese and Japanese philosophical writing on presentations of an ecological Nature in Cold War American literature. However, it differs in its countercultural focus, exploring the influence of Americanised translations of Chinese and Japanese literature and philosophy on the work of the Beat Generation writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg and Kerouac’s extensive correspondence reveals the two writers’ developing interest in Taoist and Zen Buddhist thought, and their co-development of their own Americanised and highly inauthentic ‘Beat Zen’, which was heavily influenced by Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible (1932). Taking these letters as its starting point, the chapter reveals that translated Taoism and Zen Buddhism informed each writer’s ecological depictions of the human relationship to Nature in some of their most famous contributions to Beat literature, including Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958) and Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956).