Editing Beat Generation (section)

===Internal criticism===
In a 1974 interview,<ref name="Knight, Arthur Winfield 1987">Knight, Arthur Winfield. Ed. ''The Beat Vision'' (1987), Paragon House. {{ISBN|0-913729-40-X}}; {{ISBN|0-913729-41-8}} (pbk).</ref> [[Gary Snyder]] comments on the subject of "casualties" of the Beat Generation:<ref name="Charters01">Charters (2001) ''Beat Down to Your Soul''.</ref>

<blockquote style="font-size:100%">Kerouac was a casualty too. And there were many other casualties that most people have never heard of, but were genuine casualties. Just as, in the 60s, when Allen and I for a period there were almost publicly recommending people to take acid. When I look back on that now I realize there were many casualties, and responsibilities to bear.</blockquote>

When the Beats initially set out to "construct" new communities that shirked conformity and traditionalism, they invoked the symbols of the most marginalized ethnic identities of their time. As the reality set in, of racial self-identity lost within the communal constructs of their own making, most of the Beat writers altered their message drastically to acknowledge the social impulse to marginalize the self in the conflict between isolationism and absorption of self by communal instincts seeking belonging. They began to deeply engage with new themes such as the place of the white man in America and declining patriarchal institutions.<ref>{{cite book |last=Martinez |first=Manuel Luis |title=Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera |publisher=University of Wisconsin Press |year=2003 | pages=52 |isbn=9780299192839 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PetNsyuGKAMC}}</ref>