This chapter studies a single subculture across a longer stretch of time, looking broadly on the alignment of Beat and counterculture scenes and lifestyles and how this important field of subcultural behaviour continues to form a source of fascination for novelists. The chapter begins by examining the rise of Beat and countercultural writing in the 1950s, looking in particular at novels by Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes and Alexander Trocchi. It then analyses three later novels that sensationalize, interrogate or parody some of the suggested ambitions and radical world views of the counterculture: Johnny Byrne and Jenny Fabian’s Groupie (1969), Martin Amis’s Dead Babies (1975) and Stewart Home’s Tainted Love (2005). The last section of this chapter discusses Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document (2006), a novel that offers a more nuanced reassessment of the countercultural world view, its place in the development of post-war American culture, and its continuing influence for a new generation of youth in the early twenty-first century.