Generation was a literary movement started by a group of authors
whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
James Broughton (November 10, 1913 – May 17, 1999) was an American poet and poetic filmmaker. He was part of the San Francisco Renaissance, a precursor to the Beat poets.
He attended UC Berkeley, worked as a newspaper reporter in Monterey, and spent time as a practicing painter and sculptor in France in the 1920s and 1930s. After World War II, Peterson founded Workshop 20 at the California School of Fine Arts (renamed the San Francisco Art Institute), initiating filmmaking courses at the school.[1]
Between 1947 and 1950 the workshop produced five films under Peterson's guidance that were influential on the burgeoning American avant-garde cinema, and significant artifacts of the San Francisco Renaissance.[2][3] In the years that followed, Peterson worked as a consultant for the Museum of Modern Art, made a series of documentary films, penned a novel (A Fly in the Pigment, 1961) and a memoir (The Dark of the Screen, 1980), and worked at Walt Disney Productions as a scriptwriter and storyboard artist