“It was a world of dingy backstairs pads, Times Square cafeterias, bebop joints, night-long wanderings, meetings on street corners, hitchhiking, a myriad of hip bars all over the city, and the streets themselves. It was inhabited by people hung-up with drugs and other habits, searching out a new degree of craziness, and connected by the invisible threads of need, petty crimes long ago, or a strange recognition of affinity. They kept going all the time, living by night, rushing around to make contact, suddenly disappearing into jail or on the road only to turn up again and search one another out. They had an idea of life that was underground, mysterious, and they seemed unaware of anything outside the realities of deals, a pad to stay in, ‘digging the frantic jazz,' and keeping everything going . . . . you know, everyone I know is kind of furtive, kind of beat.”
– Go, John Clellon Holmes (1952)

This was the first published instance of the use of the word beat to describe a generation