Word: kerouac
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...Though he wrote more than 50 books of verse, fiction and literary criticism and in 1940 won a Pulitzer Prize for his spare, Frostian lyrics (Collected Poems), the classroom remained his focal point for 39 years. Among the students influenced by his gentle Socratic discourses were Novelist Jack Kerouac and Poets Thomas Merton, Allen Ginsberg and John Berryman. Though stunned by the 1959 scandal involving his son Charles, who had been fed answers on the TV quiz show Twenty-One, Van Doren remained a near-legendary figure whose guidance was eagerly sought by Columbia's pupils and graduates...
...warned, are rough as cobs. But Joe Santo, whose lats and traps are so spectacular that he is a cinch to become Mr. Southeast, is another matter. He is not only an athlete of mythic skill but a knockabout saint whose sort last surfaced in the works of Kerouac and Kesey. In short, he is good, clean wish fulfillment, and author and hero fall in love with him, in the manner of small boys. Santo does an impromptu star turn at a rodeo, befriends and soothes some strung-out hippies, and finally hands over his golden girl friend to Blake...
...Irving turned up in the Beat writers' enclave of Venice, Calif. With him was a beautiful aspiring poet and former fashion model named Fay Brooke. For a time, they borrowed an apartment from Novelist Lawrence Lipton (The Holy Barbarians), one of the old men of the Kerouac generation. "He tried to make the scene here," says Lipton, "but he failed. There was agony, soul-searching, fights with Fay. He may have been the closest thing Cornell had to a hippie, but you know what that means -sometimes he didn't tie his tie." Lipton adds disdainfully: "He never...
...perspective with a name here, an influence there. But mainly he depends on rhetoric, and it blows his subject out of all proportion: "No writer better than he has ever infused travel-simply getting from one place to another-with such a keen sense of adventure." This to describe Kerouac. But, even granting such a restricted distinction, any travel book by Sir Richard Burton, to name but one other writer, makes Kerouac's sense of adventure seem like a pinball ricocheting in a glass-enclosed prison of lights and bells...
...Little Numb. In addition to Ginsberg (and Kerouac), many of the people Cook interviewed-Kenneth Rexroth, Burroughs, Poets Robert Duncan and Michael McClure-make sensible distinctions between the Beats. In fact, the distinctions are so varied that the term "beat" means anything from tired blood to street existentialism to blissful cosmic consciousness...