I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...
- Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1956)
The passage quoted above was how the father of the beat generation described the inhabitants of the bohemian scene of his day in a manner so condensed that only a poet could produce it. It took Kerouac and Burroughs full length novels to expound on this simple summation.
The emergence of hipsters can be traced back to the rise of the urban metropolis. Cosmopolitan London and Paris in the late-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries with their quaint coffee shops which apart from spawning revolutions produced dandy writers like Charles Baudelaire who elevated aesthetics to a living religion. It was he who coined the term modernity to depict the fleeting, ephemeral quality of life in an urban setting and made it the artist's role to capture its essence.
