A report on Beat Generation, Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Edie Parker

Lucien Carr (March 1, 1925 – January 28, 2005) was a key member of the original New York City circle of the Beat Generation in the 1940s; later he worked for many years as an editor for United Press International.

William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature.

Edie Kerouac-Parker (September 20, 1922 – October 29, 1993) was the author of the memoir You'll Be Okay, about her life with her first husband, Jack Kerouac, and the early days of the Beat Generation.

While an art student under George Grosz at Barnard College, she and fellow Barnard student and friend Joan Vollmer shared an apartment on 118th Street in New York City which came to be frequented by many of the then unknown Beats, among them Vollmer's eventual husband William S. Burroughs, and fellow Columbia students Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as well as Lucien Carr.

Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959), and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.

The core group of Beat Generation authors—Herbert Huncke, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Kerouac—met in 1944 in and around the Columbia University campus in New York City.

Kammerer was a childhood friend of William S. Burroughs, another scion of St. Louis wealth who knew the Carr family.

Soon after, a young woman Carr had befriended, Edie Parker, introduced Carr to her boyfriend, Jack Kerouac, then twenty-two and nearing the end of his short career as a sailor.

Carr also knew Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Parker, through whom Burroughs met Kerouac in 1944.

When two of his friends from St. Louis – University of Chicago student Lucien Carr and his admirer, David Kammerer – left for New York City, Burroughs followed.

In 1944, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife.