The Beat Generation The Beat Generation was a generation of beat, down wanderers, who traveled the continent trying to find the answer to why we are here and what here is. Some of the founders, of this movement were Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, who then was under the name of William Lee, and Allen Ginsberg. The Beats rejected the conventional American life style. As survivors of the World War II and preys of consumerism, everything that went on in the United States gave them great dissatisfaction. Their meaning of life was rediscovered from Jazz, Buddhism and drugs, which became the integral part of the beat movement. Al