This chapter takes a particular timeframe—the 1950s, a founding decade in the development of modern youth subcultures—and discusses the range of scenes jostling with each other during this period. It also addresses some of the ways in which the literary expression of subcultural identity engages with, and often challenges, the presentation of how subcultures in alternative discourses, namely mainstream media and in the critical analysis developed as part of the New Left (which itself underpins the later Birmingham School approaches). It discusses the ‘birth’ of the teenager and modern subcultures in fiction in the 1950s and the early 1960s and highlights three contexts for this discussion: teenagers, Teds, and jazz as distinctive subcultures which are attached in the critical discourse with different and often competing ideological affiliations and cultural significances. This discussion is framed against an analysis of several novels: Stella Gibbon’s Here Be Dragons (1956), Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners (1959), Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1963) and Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1959).