The Dream Machine
The Beat Generation & the Counterculture, 1940-1975
"A colorful cast of characters shaped post-World War II American literature and culture."
The exhibition reconsiders postwar literature and the ways it mirrored, predicted, and remade the culture around it, with special focus on the influential group known as “the Beats.” Pulling from the Rose Library’s rich literary collections, especially the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, the show rediscovers a number of fascinating countercultural writers and will be the first major consideration of the Beats in the U.S. in nearly a decade.