“Beat Generation was a phrase discovered by Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes in the fall of 1949… Three years went by before anyone used it again, and it was only when Holmes' book Go was published by Scribners in 1952, with the line: 'You know, everyone I know is kind of furtive, kind of beat… a sort of revolution of the soul, I guess you'd call it,' that the New York Times grabbed hold of the catchy phrase and asked him to write an article about it. Holmes's piece, This Is The Beat Generation, appeared 16 November 1952, and the Beats were defined as a public phenomenon, long after the fact. The word itself came to them from Huncke, who had been using it long before he met any of them to describe the condition he was usually in – beat.”
– From Ginsberg, A Biography by Barry Miles