A report on Lucien Carr, Beat Generation and The Town and the City

Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr (right) in 1944
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
First edition
A section devoted to the beat generation at a bookstore in Stockholm, Sweden
First edition

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.

- Lucien Carr

The 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 City

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.

- Beat Generation

The "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 City

Kerouac 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 Generation

Kerouac's The Town and the City is a fictional retelling, in which Carr is represented by the character "Kenneth Wood."

- Lucien Carr
Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr (right) in 1944

2 related topics with Alpha

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Jack Kerouac by Tom Palumbo circa 1956

Jack Kerouac

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Jack Kerouac by Tom Palumbo circa 1956
Jack Kerouac's birthplace, 9 Lupine Road, 2nd floor, West Centralville, Lowell, Massachusetts
His third of several homes growing up in the West Centralville section of Lowell
Kerouac's Naval Reserve Enlistment photograph, 1943
Jack Kerouac lived with his parents for a time above a corner drug store in Ozone Park (now a flower shop), while writing some of his earliest work.
454 West 20th Street
House in College Park in Orlando, Florida where Kerouac lived and wrote The Dharma Bums
Grave in Edson Cemetery, Lowell
On the Road excerpt in the center of Jack Kerouac Alley
Jack Kerouac Alley in Chinatown, San Francisco

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.

It was during this time that he first met the Beat Generation figures who shaped his legacy and became characters in many of his novels, such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, Lucien Carr, and William S. Burroughs.

Edie Parker

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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.

Edie 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.