… the hipster was… [a] typical lower-class dandy, dressed up like a pimp, affecting a very cool, cerebral tone – to distinguish him from the gross, impulsive types that surrounded him in the ghetto – and aspiring to the finer things in life, like very good ‘tea’, the finest of sounds – jazz or Afro-Cuban… [whereas]… the Beat was originally some earnest middle-class college boy like Kerouac, who was stifled by all the cities and the culture he had inherited and who wanted to cut out for distant and exotic places, where he could live like the ‘people’, write, smoke, and meditate.
– Goldman (1974)
Cosmic Flotsam 