This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Beat Generation did not begin in San Francisco, where its legend is usually set, but at Columbia University in New York City in 1944, when Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr and Herbert Huncke first fell into each other's orbit. What held the group together in those early years was less a program than a shared appetite: a rejection of the tidy, well-made narrative and the buttoned-down materialism of postwar American life, in favor of spontaneity, spiritual searching, an openness to Eastern religion, and a frankness about sex and drugs that the era did not expect from its writers. By the mid-1950s the group's center of gravity had shifted west, to San Francisco, where they met the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance and, at a reading in a converted auto-repair shop, Allen Ginsberg first read Howl aloud. The city's City Lights Bookstore, which published Howl in 1956, became the address most associated with the movement ever since, though its founding conversation happened three thousand miles away, on a college campus.