Kerouac’s term for the Beat circle named a Black woman’s love affair

Evidence

Kerouac’s own term, coined by his comrade Allen Ginsberg, was “subterraneans,” which he took for the title of a hastily written novella inspired by his brief, intense love affair with Alene Lee, an African American woman who passed through the Beat circle. … Published by Grove Press in early 1958, The Subterraneans was dismissed by the New York Times book columnist David Dempsey, who considered the novel notable only for its “schizophrenic disintegration of syntax” and intended exclusively for the “coterie world” from whence it came. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 26