Beat Generation
Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948 to characterize a perceived underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York. The name arose in a conversation with writer John Clellon Holmes. Kerouac allows that it was Huncke, a street hustler, who originally used the phrase "beat", in an earlier discussion with him. The adjective "beat" could colloquially mean "tired" or "beaten down" within the African-American community of the period and had developed out of the image "beat to his socks", but Kerouac appropriated the image and altered the meaning to include the connotations "upbeat", "beatific", and the musical association of being "on the beat", and "the Beat to keep" from the "Beat Generation" poem.
Underground culture
The 1960s and 1970s underground cultural movements had some connections to the ""beat generation"" which had, in turn, been inspired by the philosophers, artists and poets of the Paris Existentialist movement which gathered around Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in the years after World War II. Sartre and Camus were members of Combat, a French resistance group formed in 1942 by Henri Frenay. Frenay, Sarte and Camus were all involved in publishing Underground newspapers for the resistance. The French underground culture which inspired Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in America in the 1940s was steeped in socialist thinking before the cold war began. This, however, was not the monolithic socialism of the totalitarian Soviet state, but rather the free-thinking and expressive socialism of artists and dreamers attempting to re-think society.