![]() In October 1956, he wrote to Randall Jarrell (who at that time occupied a position today equivalent to U.S. The youngest of the Beats, he was closer than the others to Elvis and, despite his notorious acerbity, he was oddly enthusiastic about Elvis during the singer’s rapid ascent. It is, rather, to look at what the Beats thought of Elvis, this cultural phenomenon whose career loosely paralleled that of the Beat Generation. The purpose of this article, though, isn’t to draw obvious thematic or chronological connections. One can even see similarities in the early deaths of Presley and Kerouac (42 and 47, respectively). ![]() Steve Turner, in Angelheaded Hipster, noted that “Both Elvis Presley and Jack Kerouac lived long enough to be bemused by the social revolution which they had been credited in part with starting.” Barry Miles has commented upon the similarities in their final years, saying that Kerouac went through his own “’fat Elvis’ period” and that they had similar diets. In 1959, Lawrence Lipton even wrote that Beat poetry readings were attended by “huge throngs of youngsters carrying on like Elvis Presley fans at a Rock and Roll binge, shouting, stamping, whistling, doing snake dances in the aisles.” Both borrowed from (or appropriated) black culture, becoming infamous before fading away in the sixties, supplanted by a new generation of weirdos – the hippies. To the squares who looked on in horror, they must have seemed one and the same – a frightening challenge to middle-class conformity. ![]() ![]() In fact, as the Beats captivated the youth of America, giving rise to the Beatniks, Elvis was pretty much never out of the top ten. He signed his first management contract in 1955, the year that Ginsberg first read “Howl” and then shot to number #1 in the charts in 1956, the year that Howl and Other Poems was published. Although he was much younger than his Beat peers, his sudden rise to fame occurred at around the same time. There are various superficial connections between Elvis Presley and the writers of the Beat Generation. ![]()
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