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“... is more instructive and nearer to the nitty, if not indeed the actual gritty. In a letter to Jack Kerouac in April 1952, William Burroughs demanded to know: ‘Is Gore Vidal queer or not?’ Burroughs, who had once been at the same boys’ boarding-school as Vidal, can now slake his curiosity. Or he could have pressed ...”

“... legacy of poverty and squalor from which a reborn Burroughs makes sense of himself as a writer. To Jack Kerouac from Tangier (February 1955): ‘Last month I ran out of money and was 36 hours without food or junk, and sold my typewriter.’ An earlier letter to Ginsberg says, simply, that the typewriter is out of action. The important thing, perhaps, is ...”

“... of the human faculties as he seeks to fight or flee. The letters of a lesser contemporary, Jack Kerouac for instance, appear almost luminary next to these gripes and gashings. Kerouac at least described a sensibility and a falling away, punctuated with adventure and open-heartedness. With Bellow’s letters, by ...”

“... credit to a coyote’, Lady Mosley, Daphne Rae, Beatrice Webb. After them come the writer nobs: Jack Kerouac, ‘babbling on with the fluency of a jammed beer-tap’, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose ‘demand that intellectuals should “integrate with the masses” seems even more unreal than it would otherwise, coming from a man who could not bear to face an ...”

“... one side, feet precariously hooked on the other. Remember Anaïs Nin and her ‘liary’. Remember Jack Kerouac, living dangerously so he could dash back to the quiet of his mother’s house, sit down at his boyhood desk, and write his rough living down. Nonetheless, until recently there has been an expectation, quite often met, that the autobiographer ...”

“... order’. He wrote on ‘narrow strips of paper, pasted into long rolls’ (a more fastidious Jack Kerouac), allowing the narrative to flow unchecked by page breaks. The ‘music’ of words obsessed him; in the early story ‘Berenice’, Ackroyd notes ‘the melodies of Poe’s prose’ and ‘his consummate control of cadence and of open vowel ...”

“... just how those dreams had been deferred. Yet tonight the cemetery of hope and idealism is empty. Jack Kennedy is alive. Martin Luther King is alive. Bobby Kennedy is alive. James Baldwin is alive. Janis Joplin is alive. Jack Kerouac is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim ...”

“... fit, weathered, narrow-eyed, skin creased and printed like a proper manuscript of mortality. Jack Kerouac, in The Dharma Bums (1958), took Snyder, in the person of Japhy Ryder, as the second American hero of his open-form mythology, a scholar-poet of the mountains and the Pacific west, after Neal Cassady’s transcontinental road ...”

“... story, the form of this book is also of its time – most of the words in it were supplied by Jack Kerouac – and itself invites interpretation. What is the importance of the analysis of habits and publishing practices which such interpretations deal in? According to one account, the work is formed by, and not strictly separable from, its matrix. A ...”

“... its ability to tell complex stories – its contributors included William Faulkner, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and Don DeLillo. In Blood in the Garden, Herring is firmly in narrative mode, and he wants to remind us what a good narrative sport basketball is.This is true for several reasons, some more interesting than others. First, the obvious ...”

“... in the movie Reds, speaking about the leftish environment that hosted the love affair between Jack Reed and Louise Bryant, he commented on the sexual relationships of his own early years. ‘There was just as much fucking going on then as now,’ he said, ‘only now it has a more perverted quality, now there’s no love whatever included. Then there was ...”

“... a definite commodity … I’ve had oil-painting shows that were very realistic, then I’ve done jack-off collages, cut-outs one year and drawings … it’s all been different … People want to buy a Warhol or a person instead of a work. My work’s never become ‘a Brainard’. Or even a Jainard or a Bernard or a Joe. Here are the last six ‘I ...”

“... work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which there were more than a million by the end of the ...”

“... carries along a road,’ Stendhal famously said, situating himself somewhere between Hamlet and Jack Kerouac. In context, the remark is a dubious apology for some of the contents of Le Rouge et le Noir, not at all to be trusted; and out of context it seems even less reliable, too bland and hands-off by half. Who chooses the road, the angle of the ...”

“... at a party, it’s getting late, and she has promised the babysitter she will be home by 11.30. Jack Kerouac announces: ‘Di Prima, unless you forget about your babysitter, you’re never going to be a writer.’ In Creeley’s version of events, di Prima takes Kerouac’s advice and ‘charmingly’ stays for an ...”