William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky stayed at Paris’s Beat Hotel in the late 1950s.
The Beat Hotel was located at 9 rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter. It was a small lodging house that became a meeting place for American writers, artists, and travelers connected with the Beat scene.
Burroughs worked on Naked Lunch-related material there, while Ginsberg and Orlovsky spent part of the period in the building during the late 1950s. Gregory Corso was also associated with the hotel, making it a particularly important European setting for Beat literary history.
The name “Beat Hotel” was an informal label rather than the original official name of a grand Parisian hotel. The building’s modest scale is part of its historical significance. Readers sometimes confuse it with the Paris cafés and literary hotels associated with earlier expatriate writers, but the Beat Hotel specifically belongs to the postwar Beat circle.