Literary Movement Reading Challenge 2015 – November: The Beat Generation or The Bloomsbury Group

The Beat Generation (1945 – 1965)

The Beat Generation was a group of American post-World War II writers who came to prominence in the 1950s. Central elements of "Beat" culture included rejection of received standards, innovations in style, experimentation with drugs, alternative sexualities, an interest in religion, a rejection of materialism, and explicit portrayals of the human condition. They saw runaway capitalism as destructive to the human spirit and antithetical to social equality. They fashioned a literature that was more bold, straightforward, and expressive than anything that had come before. [Source 1] [Source 2]

Some of the Beat authors:

(you may pick other authors outside this list)

Jack Kerouac

Allen Ginsberg

William S. Burroughs

Ken Kesey

Neal Cassady

Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

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The Bloomsbury Group (1903 – 1964)

The Bloomsbury Group was a small, informal association of artists and intellectuals who lived and worked in the Bloomsbury area of central London. Although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts. The members of Bloomsbury, or “Bloomsberries,” would more or less maintain allegiance to their mutual philosophy of an ideal society, even through a World War and three decades of tectonic shifts in the political climate. One of their philosophies is: one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. [Source 1] [Source 2]

Some of the Bloomsbury authors:

(you may pick other authors outside this list)

Virginia Woolf

E.M. Forster

Giles Lytton Strachey

John Maynard Keynes

Clive Bell

You can submit your review posts on The Beat Generation and The Bloomsbury Group books in the linky below (linky will be opened on November 15^th, 2015)