A report on Edie Parker, The Town and the City and Beat Generation
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.
- Edie ParkerThe novel is focused on two locations (as suggested by the title): one, the early Beat Generation circle of New York in the late 1940s, the other, the nearly rural small town of Galloway, Massachusetts that the main character comes from, before going off to college on a football scholarship.
- The Town and the CityThe "city" represents a number of figures of the early beat circle: Allen Ginsberg (as Leon Levinsky), Lucien Carr (as Kenneth Wood), William Burroughs (as Will Dennison), Herbert Huncke (as Junky), David Kammerer (as Waldo Meister), Edie Parker (as Judie Smith) and also Joan Vollmer (as Mary Dennison) -- though she essentially has a non-speaking role (however some of her ideas are quoted by the Ginsberg-figure).
- The Town and the CityEdie appears as Judie Smith in Kerouac's novel The Town and the City, Elly in Visions of Cody, Edna "Johnnie" Palmer of Vanity of Duluoz, and herself in "The Original Scroll" – the unedited edition of On the Road.
- Edie ParkerCarr also knew Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Parker, through whom Burroughs met Kerouac in 1944.
- Beat GenerationKerouac wrote about this incident twice in his own works: once in his first novel, The Town and the City, and again in one of his last, Vanity of Duluoz.
- Beat Generation2 related topics with Alpha
Jack Kerouac
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Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
His first published book was The Town and the City, and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957.
He continued to live for a time in New York's Upper West Side with his girlfriend and future first wife, Edie Parker.
Lucien Carr
1 linksLucien 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.
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.
Kerouac's The Town and the City is a fictional retelling, in which Carr is represented by the character "Kenneth Wood."