The Beat Generation and Counterculture examines three authors associated with the Beat Generation Paul Bowles William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and the relevance of their attempt to travel learn and write about exotic nonWestern cultures and repressed minority cultures in the United States projecting the influence of history premodern religious practices and postcolonial social and intellectual problems into the written development of countercultural ethos and praxis. The Beat Generation and Counterculture underscores T. S. Eliots emphasis on earning tradition that is in order for the corrupt decultured and unimaginative West that had been ruined by World War II to survive it would have to internalize and project the value of distant cultures that had been misunderstood and racialized for centuries. This book also addresses the frequent criticism that these authors were orientalist white writers who freely translated nonWestern culture without giving any credit to its creators.