"Beatnik" was slang (part of the fad for -nik following on Sputnik in 1957) for "beat" = member of the Beat Generation, a term popularized by John Clellon Holmes in a rather sensational article in the New York Times Magazine in 1952, and attributed by him to Jack Kerouac. For him, it meant his own generation, which was adolescent during W.W. II -- too young to have fought in it, but old enough to have been shaken up by it. "The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedom, and their ability to live at a pace that kills, to which war had adjusted them, led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism and Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later."

--- Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

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