Religion: Beat Mystics

In the smoke-filled cellar cafés and cold-water flats of San Francisco's waterfront and Manhattan's Greenwich Village, the word these days is "beat." Patriarch and prophet of what he calls "the beat generation" is a 35-year-old writer named Jack Kerouac, whose recent novel On the Road (TIME, Sept. 16) chronicled the cross-country adventures in cars, bars and beds of a bunch of fancy-talking young bums. Last week, in newspaper interviews with TV's Mike Wallace, Novelist Kerouac and equally beat Poet Philip Lamantia explained that beatness is really a religious movement.

Wallace: You mean beat...

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