“In the mid-fifties, a small group of writers, artists and assorted hangers-on coalesced in San Fransisco and around Carmel and Big Sur on the California coast. Quicly dubbed “beats” or “beatniks,” they pieced together a distinctive way of life.

Its most conscpicuous elements were the glorification of poverty—jeans, sandals, pads and hovels; a predilection for Negro jazz and jargon; an interest in Eastern mysticism and French existentialism; and a general antagonism to technologically based society.

—Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970.