In 1944, three aspiring writers, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, met on the campus of Columbia University in New York City. At that time, Greenwich Village was the “hip” place to be—with its low rents and proximity to the University, it was a haven for artists, writers, and political bohemians. Kerouac was there on a football scholarship, but he quickly quit the team. Ginsberg was gay and Burroughs was bisexual, which in those days made them criminals as well as social outcasts. All of them felt alienated from what they perceived as tight-laced American society, and spoke together of a “New Vision”. They adopted the moniker “The Beat Generation”, from an African-American expression “beat down to my socks”, referring to a tired and worn-out person with no money and no hope.

Although the three were city-bred and middle-class, they became attracted to the New York City street underworld, made friends with a petty criminal named Herbert Huncke, and were soon experimenting with heroin. At one point, one of their gay friends stabbed another gay friend who was stalking him and dumped the body into the Hudson. Kerouac and Burroughs helped him dispose of the murder weapon and were charged as accessories, but never put on trial. In 1949 Ginsburg was arrested with a car full of stolen goods, and pleaded to a short stay in a mental hospital instead of jail.

In 1954, Ginsburg visited a friend in San Francisco and decided to stay there. Kerouac and another friend, Neal Cassady, took a series of road trips, traveling from New York to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, New Orleans, and Mexico City, then joined Ginsburg and Burroughs in California. Each of them had been writing steadily, but none had found much success in getting published.

It was while in San Francisco in 1951 that Kerouac decided to try a new approach to writing, one that was inspired by African-American jazz music. He was smitten by the ability of jazz musicians to improvise melodies and to depart from musical conventions, and he wanted to do the same with literary writing. So he adopted a style that he later called “spontaneous prose”, a sort of “stream of consciousness” method in which he would pour out on paper whatever came to mind in one long uninterrupted torrent, without break or revision. It was, Kerouac thought, more authentic and allowed him to more fully capture the moment.

As his topic he chose the road trips he had just taken with his friend Cassady, in a fictionalized story he would call On the Road. In later accounts, he would declare that he had written the entire novel in a three-week period, fueled by booze, speed and soup, and going so far as to tape several hundred sheets of paper together end to end in one continuous roll so he would not need to interrupt himself to change sheets in the typewriter. In reality, he had been making extensive notes for several years and had already worked out a detailed outline.

But, like his earlier works, he was unable to interest a publisher, and spent the next six years revising his manuscript. Editors were put off On the Road because of its detailed descriptions of drug use and its openly sexual (and particularly gay) passages. Finally in 1957, an editor at Viking Press managed to get the book accepted, though with heavy revisions—the names were changed to prevent libel suits, and most of the sex and drugs were excised.

In July 1957, while On the Road was being edited, Kerouac moved to Orlando FL, and was living there with his mother when the book was released. The reviews, to his surprise, were uniformly ebullient, and almost overnight Kerouac became one of the most famous writers in the US. Within a short time, Ginsburg had also released his poem Howl and Burroughs published Naked Lunch, also to universal praise (though both were arrested on “obscenity” charges). The “Beat Generation” had become an instant literary genre, then a cultural phenomenon. Dubbed “Beatniks” (a play on “Sputnik”, because the Beats were said to be far-out, spacey, and probably Soviet), the image of the bohemian bongo-playing nonconformist became a stock character in books and movies, culminating in “Maynard G Krebs”, the goateed sandaled hipster in the TV show “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”. Another TV series, “Route 66”, copied Kerouac’s storyline of two friends on a long-distance road trip.

Kerouac was already working on a new book, based on his interest in Buddhism and titled The Dharma Bums, but with the success of On the Road, publishers were anxious to publish his many earlier manuscripts, some of them only half-finished, that he had previously been unable to find any interest in.

But fame did not sit well with Jack Kerouac. By nature, he was shy and introverted and didn’t like the attention. When the “Beatnik Culture” began to morph in the 1960s into the Hippie Counterculture, Ginsburg became a muse for the Movement, while Kerouac, who through his entire life remained a devout Catholic, rejected much of the hippie culture and its radical politics, and always insisted that On the Road was not a story of cultural rebels but just “two Catholic guys looking for God”. He slipped deeper and deeper into alcoholism. In October 1969, while living in St Petersburg FL (in a house next to his mother’s), Kerouac developed a stomach hemorrhage brought on by alcohol, and died at age 47.

On the Road remains in print today.

In the late 1990s a nonprofit group called Kerouac Project of Orlando Inc. purchased the then-derelict house on Clouser Avenue where Kerouac was living when On the Road was released, refurbished it, and began to offer it rent-free to struggling authors. Since then, there have been over 70 writers-in-residence, each living there for three months. The house is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

A few photos.

​ The house

​ The current writer-in-residence. She told me at least 4-5 people drop by every day to see the house.

​ She was kind enough to shoot a photo of me in front of the house.