In tribute to On the Road's 50th anniversary, the books blog has been celebrating the work of Kerouac and co with a series of articles under the banner of "Beats week". But

what would Kerouac think were he alive today? For starters he would probably scoff at the very name "Beats week", as would the other so-called Beats. According to Kerouac, a Times

Square hustler called Herbert Huncke coined the term. Kerouac said: "Huncke appeared to us and said 'I'm beat' with radiant light shining out of his despairing eyes...a

word perhaps brought from some Midwest carnival or junk cafeteria." Gary Snyder said: "I'm not a Beat poet. I never did know exactly what was meant by the term Beats."

condemn this Beats week blog as "stupid"? Kerouac tries to define the term "Beat" in his essay Origins of the Beat Generation, but probably at the behest of media

pressure. Kerouac said: "It was as a Catholic I had a vision of what I must have really meant with 'Beat'...the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific." He

said Dean Moriarty is "Beat - the road, the soul of the beatific." He added that he was surprised at the reaction to On the Road and how "everyone began yelling about a Beat

Generation" calling him "the avatar" of the resulting Beat phenomenon. This he neither intended nor desired. Kerouac wished to emphasise the importance and relevance of his

French-Canadian background, and his love of America because the country welcomed in his immigrant parents. But the media was more interested in the hipster, or more specifically Dean

Moriarty. The existence of a Beat Generation or a Beat style of writing is more a media construct than a conscious blueprint for action on behalf of the writer. When we hear the words

"Beat Generation" most of us immediately think of the trinity of Kerouac-Ginsberg-Burroughs. But for all the talk of a Beat way of writing, these three had very different styles.

Corso said: "The Beats I really knew, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, they were all very diverse in their writing styles." Allen Ginsberg's Howl is much more negative than the

celebration of the individual in On the Road. Dubbed The Waste Land for the post-second world war generation, Ginsberg was more political, whereas Kerouac more religious. Ginsberg, victim of

social oppression for his homosexuality, has a vendetta against 1950s conformist America. The ban of Howl was repealed due to its "redeeming social importance". It is a tribute,

as Howl itself declares, to "the best minds of [Ginsberg's] generation destroyed by madness", primarily his friend Carl Solomon, who Ginsberg met in a mental institution. Such

is the negativity of the poem, he talks of "Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in

the parks!" A pertinent portrait of today, perhaps, but not holding much in common with Kerouac. Burroughs meanwhile was more like Ginsberg in viewing the world around him like a penal

colony. Burroughs saw writing as a way to decode the world around him and undermine the conspiracy of Western civilisation. He thought writers were very powerful beings because they

controlled language. Ultimately he saw in society, a linguistic determinism that determined shaped and mechanised human beings, which he tried to bring down through radical styles of writing

such as the cut-up method. Kerouac was a traditionalist, writing as a celebration of the individual in pursuit of a good time and eventually wanting to settle down and marry. He said:

"All these years I was looking for the woman I wanted to marry." Kerouac stated a common misapprehension many people held in that he was not consciously seeking to challenge

America in any political way - unlike Burroughs and Ginsberg. And also in writing style, Kerouac believed in spontaneity while Burroughs was the opposite, working through revision and

selectivity, namely in the cut-up. So in marking the anniversary of On the Road, we must be wary of false labels and use of the word "Beat". Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, the

much-lauded Beat canon, were three close associates who were in actual fact three very different writers uncomfortable with the "Beat" term that tied them together. Beat critic Ann

Douglas differentiates between the three, describing Kerouac as the mythologiser, Ginsberg the prophet and Burroughs the theorist. In the end Kerouac was unable to live with the Beat myth

his success had turned him into. Chronicled in one of his saddest novels, Big Sur, Kerouac fell victim to depression and alcoholism and died in 1969 aged 47.