On the evening of October 21, 1969, Allen Ginsberg received a telephone call from the journalist Al Aronowitz: Jack Kerouac had died, earlier that day, in a Florida hospital. For Ginsberg, it was the second such call in just over a year and a half. On February 10, 1968, he had learned that Neal Cassady, the inspiration for “On the Road” and, aside from Kerouac, Ginsberg’s closest friend, had died, in Mexico.

The Kerouac news deeply saddened Ginsberg but did not surprise him. Kerouac’s heavy drinking over the previous decade had increased to such an extent that his closest friends wondered if he had a death wish. Ginsberg and Kerouac had grown distant—largely because Kerouac had become less and less available to Ginsberg, but also because Ginsberg no longer wished to be around his old friend, who, on any given night, could be a belligerent, unhappy, argumentative, and nasty drunk. Kerouac had remarried, bought a house for his wife and his invalid mother, and moved to Florida, where he lived a semi-reclusive life.

Immediately after hearing the news of Kerouac’s death, this was not the man Ginsberg remembered. He recalled the joyful, enthusiastic, ambitious, prodigious writer whose work influenced his own. Kerouac had basked in the heat of spontaneity; he had put Ginsberg on the path to Buddhism; the two had shared their innermost thoughts. His intelligence had been a beacon.

Ginsberg recorded fragments of his thoughts and memories of Kerouac in his journals, as he had done when he learned of Cassady’s death. He also wrote a long poem, “Memory Gardens,” which was composed over several sittings and was eventually included in his National Book Award-winning volume, “The Fall of America,” which was published in 1973.

Those initial journal entries are presented here on the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s death.

— Michael Schumacher