Naming a Generation

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Jack Kerouac is credited with coining the phrase Beat Generation in conversation in 1948, years before On the Road appeared in print, using beat to suggest both the exhaustion of the postwar years and, as he later explained the term, a kind of beatific spiritual seeking underneath that exhaustion. The name stuck to Kerouac's circle of friends, including Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, and by the time On the Road was published in 1957 the phrase had already entered wider American use as a label for a new kind of restless, nonconformist youth culture that the novel's success only accelerated.