Though the Beat Generation came alive in the 1950s with works like Howl by Allen Ginsberg (pictured, far right), the 1960s saw the movement flourish with beatniks eschewing “square” society in everything they did — dress, manners, vocabulary and poetry. Beat poets wanted to free their work from academic strictures and often read their pieces to jazz and a chorus of finger snapping in areas such as New York City’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s North Beach — beatnik strongholds. While Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were the fathers of the Beatniks, writers like Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder carried the torch well into the ’60s. But don’t look for any of their descendants now in lower Manhattan.
Top 10 Things We Miss About the Mad Men Era
Mad Men, the popular show about advertising executives in the 1960s, returns to television this weekend. TIME takes a look at the things we miss about that swinging decade