'beats' or 'beatniks'

'In the mid-fifties, a small group of writers, artists and assorted hangers-on coalesced in San Fransisco and around Carmel and Big Sur on the California coast. Quicly dubbed 'beats' or 'beatniks,' they pieced together a distinctive way of life.

Its most conscpicuous elements were the glorification of poverty'jeans, sandals, pads and hovels; a predilection for Negro jazz and jargon; an interest in Eastern mysticism and French existentialism; and a general antagonism to technologically based society.

'Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970.