Many people are aware of the Beat Generation.  Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Jack are all well known writers.  People associate their name with obscene rebellion, heavy drug use, and homosexuality, but not everyone understands the true message the Beats were trying to send.  They were seekers of visionary enlightenment, Buddhists.  They rejected the modern attitude towards poetry along with the middle-class American society.  They wrote works advertising the purposelessness of modern society and the need for protest, weather physically or through writing.  They sought spiritual liberation, sexual revolution, black liberation, woman liberation, the decriminalization of various drugs, to raise awareness of ecological consequences, to destroy censorship, and opposition to military-industrial civilization.