Beat Generation is a 1950s american literary movement of countercultural writers rejecting conformity and embracing spontaneity, jazz, and eastern thought.
The Beat Generation took shape in 1940s New York around Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, then spread to San Francisco's North Beach by the mid-1950s. Three works defined it: Ginsberg's 'Howl' (1956), Kerouac's 'On the Road' (1957), and Burroughs's 'Naked Lunch' (1959). The movement rejected post-war American conformity, suburban consumerism, and McCarthyite repression in favour of spontaneous prose, jazz rhythms, drug experimentation, queer visibility, Buddhism, and a search for ecstatic experience. The Beats prepared the ground for the 1960s counterculture — Bob Dylan, the hippie movement, environmentalism, and gay liberation all carry their fingerprints. Critics often dismissed them as undisciplined; the movement's defence is that discipline itself was what they were trying to escape, and that real literature could not be made inside its constraints.