The settings in which the formative events of the Beat Generation took place included coffeehouses, bars, colleges, and nightclubs of New York City and San Francisco. These were the establishments where students—aspiring artists, poets, and writers—from Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, Portland’s Reed College, and North Carolina’s Black Mountain College gathered to meet other writers and artists, formulating the ideas and philosophies that would form the basis of the post-World War II American countercultural landscape. It was in such intimate venues as the San Remo bar, the Peace Eye Bookstore, and St. Mark’s Church in New York City, as well as the Cellar Bar, the Coffee Gallery, the Poetry Center, and the City Lights Bookstore in the North Beach section of San Francisco, that influential friendships were forged, ideas were exchanged, and poetry readings were performed. Soon the movement began to spread to other regions, and the life-styles and values espoused in the poetry and fiction of the Beat Generation began to appear in mainstream American art and music.
The bohemian communities of San Francisco’s North Beach area and New York City’s Greenwich Village were already well established by the time the quintessential Beats Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac became acquainted at Columbia University in 1944.
