result of a very slow germination process. The four original Beats, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, met in New York in the late forties. More than a decade would pass before Ginsberg's Howl ignited the explosion that would coalesce the disparate ideas, the sense of lifestyle, and the philosophical musings into a full-fledged literary movement.

The term beat was first used by Jack Kerouac in 1948 while talking to his friend Clellon Holmes: "So I guess you might say we're a beat generation." Holmes later wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine, entitled "The Beat Generation," saying, "It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul, a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness." Soon Ginsberg and Kerouac were emphasizing the "beatific" qualities of the word, making of it a mystical, transcendental experience. Ginsberg explained, "The point of Beat is that you get beat down to a certain nakedness where you actually are able to see the world in a visionary way, which is the old classical understanding of what happens in the dark night of the soul." Howl led the way; Kerouac's On the Road followed with unprecedented media attention; Burroughs' Naked Lunch, banned and vilified, broke through the barriers of censorship, and a literary movement was born.

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