“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
—JACK KEROUAC
Following the end of World War II, a flood of new consumers strengthened the U.S. economy, and the nation’s gross national product more than doubled between 1940 and 1960. Americans moved from cities to the suburbs, and car and home ownership rose significantly. While it was a time of peace and prosperity, it was also a time of rigid conformity and dissatisfaction built upon deep class and racial divisions. The nuclear family (consisting of a husband, a wife, and a small litter of children) was worshipped as the building block of society, a model that far too many men and women broke themselves financially trying to follow.
Many men returned from the war and traded their military uniforms for suits and ties and entered the corporate workforce. White-collar jobs outnumbered blue-collar, labor-intensive jobs, and men struggled to find meaning in their work. Middle-class women, who mostly stayed at home to raise children during this era, were more isolated than ever in the suburbs as their commuter husbands left them every day. Alcohol use increased dramatically from previous generations.
A 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, peeled back the veneer on postwar America. After the protagonist, overworked husband Tom Rath, tosses a vase at a wall out of frustration, he patches the plaster and repaints the wall with his wife. “When the paint dried, the big dent near the floor with the crack curving up from it almost to the ceiling in the shape of a question mark was still clearly visible,” Wilson wrote. “The fact that the crack was in the shape of a question mark did not seem symbolic to Tom and Betsy, nor even amusing—it was just annoying.” The crack was clearly supposed to be symbolic to readers, though, who worried that the postwar confidence was wearing thin.
A small but vocal opposition group slipped through the crack: the Beats. Just as the Decadents had shattered the façade of the Victorian era, the Beat generation was destined to agitate the postwar world.
The Beats incorporated drug experimentation, alternative forms of sexuality, Eastern religion, and a rejection of materialism into their work. They were nonconformists whose bohemian hedonism set the stage for the counterculture revolution in the 1960s. At the same time, existentialism was sweeping across Europe. Existentialist philosophy stressed individuality and freedom in the face of a meaningless and absurd world, and the French trio of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus blazed new philosophical trails in Europe while the Beat writers were expounding upon the absurdity of life in the United States.
The Beats were, in Norman Mailer’s words, “American existentialists. If our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. One is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.”
One of the founders of the Beat movement, Jack Kerouac, said, “John Clellon Holmes and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said, ‘You know, John, this is really a beat generation’; and he leapt up and said, ‘That’s it, that’s right!’ ”
The Beats started their careers in New York in the 1950s, in “an age of writers,” journalist Brock Bower said. “Our heroes were writers. We wanted to be writers.” Novelist and model Alice Denham, who dated many of the literary heavyweights of the age, wrote, “New York in the fifties was like Paris in the twenties. Going to New York was scaling a skyscraper to a literary dream. Nobody wanted to be a movie star or a rock star. In the fifties everybody wanted to write the Great American Novel.” They were, like the Decadents, a boys’ club, relegating Denham to the sidelines.
The Beat generation experimented with a number of different drugs, including marijuana, Benzedrine, peyote, LSD, and morphine. It was only fitting that they sample the wares, as the number of drugs available in America had expanded greatly since the early part of the century. Like outlaw writer-heroes of past eras, the writers of the 1950s were considered suspect—J. Edgar Hoover called the Beats “one of the three most dangerous groups in America.”
Many prominent writers were caught up in the witch hunt for Communists, including Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway. Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) knew a thing or two about persecution: his mother, Naomi Livergant Ginsberg, suffered from paranoid delusions (although paranoia was par for the course during the 1950s, especially for card-carrying Communist Party members such as Naomi). The president had listening devices planted in our home, she told her son. She subsequently attempted suicide by slitting her wrists, and was hospitalized in mental institutions for much of Ginsberg’s youth.
When Ginsberg came of age, he left New Jersey for Columbia University, where he first met Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Ginsberg had his own mental problems, however, and was suspended from Columbia at one point while he received in-patient treatment at Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. But he didn’t believe he was “crazy,” at least not on the same level as the other patients at the mental asylum. “The people here see more visions in one day than I do in a year,” he wrote to Kerouac.
Ginsberg had a grander vision in his head: he believed in a “New Vision” for American literature (a phrase adapted from Arthur Rimbaud). With Kerouac and Burroughs, he had the means of achieving this goal.
“There wouldn’t have been any Beat Generation without Allen Ginsberg, who, besides being a genius poet, was a genius publicist,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti, cofounder of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, said.
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), like F. Scott Fitzgerald, was a failed jock. His skill as a football running back in high school earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and Columbia University. He chose Columbia. Unfortunately, Kerouac cracked a tibia in his freshman year, abruptly ending his college football career.
He dropped out of college but continued to live in New York City. He briefly joined the Marines in 1942 and the Navy in 1943 before being honorably discharged on psychiatric grounds after just eight days of active duty. “I just can’t stand it,” he told the military medical examiner. “I like to be by myself.”
Kerouac married his girlfriend, Edie Parker, in 1944; they divorced just two months later. As he said, he liked to be by himself.
Back in New York City after his military discharge and divorce, he met the trio of Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. “What a great city New York is!” he wrote to his parents in 1947. “We are living at just the right time—[poet Samuel] Johnson and his London, Balzac and his Paris, Socrates and his Athens—the same thing again.”
Kerouac left New York for Denver in 1947 and traveled the country for the next four years working on his debut novel, The Town and the City. After that book’s publication in 1950, he finally settled down with Joan Haverty, his second wife, whom he had proposed to after knowing only a few days.
The newlywed Kerouac sat down at his typewriter. Fueled by coffee and pea soup (according to his wife), Kerouac pounded out On the Road in a three-week offensive, reportedly using journals from his journeys for reference and typing on a 120-foot scroll of tracing paper.
In addition to all that pea soup and coffee, however, Kerouac was powered by something much stronger: amphetamines. First synthesized in Japan in 1919, amphetamines mimicked the stimulating effects of cocaine, increasing energy and decreasing appetite in users. Unfortunately, like cocaine, so-called “speed” was also prone to abuse.
The Smith, Kline & French pharmaceutical company introduced one of the most popular amphetamines in 1928: Benzedrine. Although it was available only as an inhaler for the purposes of dilating nasal and bronchial passages, users caught on quickly to its stimulating properties. They cracked open Benzedrine inhalers and swallowed the paper strips inside. Not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, Smith, Kline & French introduced Benzedrine in tablet form. Doctors began prescribing the drug as an appetite suppressant and miracle cure for fatigue. The FDA was well aware of the recreational abuse of “bennies” and other amphetamines, finally taking steps to control their usage in the 1950s.
Biographer Ann Charters believed Kerouac took Benzedrine to intensify his awareness and make him feel cleverer. “Each of Kerouac’s books was written on something and each of the books has some of the feel of what he was on most as he wrote it. On the Road has a nervous, tense and Benzedrine feel,” she wrote. It’s not hard to see why Kerouac and other writers would fall in love with a drug like Benzedrine: when one is paid for creative output, and not for time, the pressure is on the author to put words on paper as quickly as possible.
On the Road was a freewheeling road map for a new generation who rejected their parents’ suburban values, featuring taboo topics such as bisexuality, interracial love, and group sex. Publishers initially rejected the book as obscene, slapdash, and unpublishable.
Kerouac’s wife left him later in the year and gave birth to his only child, a girl, in February 1952. Kerouac continued to write and travel, but he fell into bouts of depression, intensified by heavy drug and alcohol abuse. Kerouac was eternally angry, and the drugs and alcohol didn’t do much to take the edge off. One time at Ginsberg’s apartment, Kerouac agreed to test psilocybin (a hallucinogenic drug), administered by drug guru Timothy Leary. Instead of mellowing out, as Leary expected, Kerouac confronted a critic in person and threatened to toss the man out of a window over a negative review.
In 1953, Kerouac sat back down at the typewriter for another marathon session of word-banging. He completed The Subterraneans in just three days—with the help of Uncle Benny, of course. “Benny has made me see a lot,” he once said.
Ginsberg, a mellow pothead for the most part, disapproved of Kerouac’s amphetamine abuse. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” Ginsberg famously wrote in his epic poem “Howl.” Ginsberg and others recognized that there was a terrible downside to speed. “The period of euphoria is followed by a horrible depression,” Burroughs wrote.
Viking Press finally published Kerouac’s On the Road in September 1957. The New York Times proclaimed Kerouac the voice of a new generation: “Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the ‘Lost Generation,’ so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the ‘Beat Generation.’”
Fame was a double-edged sword for Kerouac. On the one hand, he was able to usher many of his old manuscripts into print; on the other, he was a celebrity and didn’t feel safe leaving his house. “He didn’t object to being famous, but he realized he wasn’t famous—he was notorious,” John Clellon Holmes said. According to Joyce Johnson, “People knew him all over the Village. It was exhausting to go out with him. Women wanted him to make love to them. One woman said to me at a party, ‘I have to fuck him now!’ ”
One night in New York City, three men assaulted Kerouac outside the San Remo Bar on Bleecker Street. His friend Cassady was arrested for selling marijuana, possibly as a result of his association with On the Road. Critics attacked Kerouac’s subsequent “Duluoz Legend” books, Big Sur and Desolation Angels, more for Kerouac’s personality than the books’ content. In a letter to Ginsberg, he wrote, “I hitchhiked and starved, for art, and that makes me the Fool of the Beatniks with a crown of shit. Thanks, America.” Kerouac wrote to another friend that it was “no wonder Hemingway went to Cuba.”
Kerouac moved back to his home state of Massachusetts, where he was able to avoid the spotlight. He withdrew from daily life, sedating himself with alcohol. His once-handsome face bloated nearly beyond recognition. At his local watering hole, Mello’s Bar, Kerouac was just another drunk. He loved to enter the bar and proclaim, “I’m Jack Kerouac!”
The bartender would playfully chide him by saying, “How much do you make a year?”
“About as much as you do,” Kerouac replied.
“That’s nothing,” the bartender would say. “If you’ve published all them books you told me about, how come you don’t make more?”
Kerouac’s decline was in sharp contrast to the romantic image of the drunken writer that was pervasive in the 1950s. In a time when alcohol and cigarette use was de rigueur, a bottle of whiskey was as important as a typewriter for aspiring writers.
Still, Time praised Kerouac’s 1968 novel Vanity of Duluoz as his best work. Atlantic Monthly paid tribute with an unpublished section of the novel. The media seemed to have turned a corner in its antagonistic relationship with Kerouac. But just days after the novel’s publication, Kerouac learned that Cassady had been found dead in Mexico, his body lying beside a railroad track.
Kerouac refused to believe the news. “Guys like Neal just don’t do things like that,” he told his friend Charles E. Jarvis, a literature professor.
“You mean like dying?” Jarvis said.
“That’s right. I mean, not at this point. Neal is in his prime,” Kerouac said. (Cassady was forty-one.) “Any day now, I’ll get a letter from Neal wanting to know if I’m wearing a black band around my arm!”
Unfortunately, no letter was forthcoming.
Kerouac’s own end was not far off. While he’s frequently misquoted as saying, “I’m Catholic and I can’t commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death,” that’s not far from the truth. Kerouac died from internal bleeding in 1969, a result of years of alcohol abuse. He was forty-seven. Despite writing thirty books, only three were still in print.
At the funeral, Eric Ehrmann asked Sterling Lord, Kerouac’s agent, why he never tried to intervene and put an end to his client’s drinking. “Jack liked his scotch” was all Lord could say.
“I learned one of the unwritten rules of the writing profession,” Ehrmann wrote. “When somebody wants to check out, friends honor boundaries and rarely intervene. Nobody stopped Ernest Hemingway from pulling the trigger. Nobody stopped Jerzy Kosi
ski from doing himself in. Or Tennessee Williams from guzzling the booze and pills. And nobody stopped Jack.”