Origins: Columbia University 1944

The Beat Generation began not in San Francisco coffee houses, but in the ivy-covered halls of Columbia University. In 1944, a magnetic and troubled student named Lucien Carr orchestrated the meeting that would change American literature forever. Carr brought together his roommate Allen Ginsberg, a precocious poet from New Jersey; Jack Kerouac, a former Columbia football player and aspiring novelist; and William Burroughs, a Harvard graduate and heir to the adding machine fortune.

• Carr's charismatic personality drew the group together

• Ginsberg and Kerouac bonded over poetry and jazz

• Burroughs introduced them to drugs and criminal underworld

• The group rejected academic literary establishment