Cassady married the Holy Goof even after finding him in bed with Ginsberg and his first wife. She was the wife of Neal Cassady and friends with Ginsberg and Kerouac. He killed David Kammerer and sought refuge with Burroughs and Kerouac. He was the embodiment of Beat – intelligent yet wild, well-read but crazy. He appears in several Ginsberg poems and in two Kerouac books.Ĭarr was central to the Beat movement. He was a wild man like Neal Cassady, and celebrated as such.

In his short life, Cannastra made a big impression upon the early Beat Generation. If you don’t, then no few lines is enough – buy his books and books about him. If you are reading this, then you know his story and his work. He appeared in both On the Road and Naked Lunch.īurroughs should need no brief biography printed on the pages of Beatdom. He was never well-known outwith the Beat circle, but he made an impact on Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Corso. The following is a list of real people who appeared in Kerouac’s novels, along with the different names Kerouac gave them.Īnsen was big influence on several of the Beats. Their personalities were all unique, and after learning a few key facts, we can take a look at Kerouac’s novels again and remove the masks, revealing the true participants in the fables of the Beat Generation. Writing in dangerous times, Kerouac’s publishers demanded he change names to avoid lawsuits and prosecution, and given the furor surrounding ‘Howl’ and Naked Lunch, it’s probably for the best that he did.īut nowadays we are surrounded by books, websites, and documentaries about the Beat Generation, and anyone that takes an interest is soon provided with a view of the players in the movement. These pseudonyms fool no one, however, and are deliberately transparent. We can pretty much go through each one of Kerouac’s books and find other sources to verify the accuracy of an event, but all the names, and some of the places, are fictitious. Yet his books are called novels, not autobiographies or non-fiction texts. Find other issues of Beatdom here.Īnyone who knows anything about the Beat Generation knows that while Ginsberg may have been the movement’s publicist, Kerouac was its archivist. This list of characters from Jack Kerouac’s novels originally appeared in Issue Three, which is no longer available.

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