That's an intro to a novel by Jan Kerouac—Jack's daughter—which is newly reprinted. It (the intro) is well written and her (Kerouac's daughter's) story is incredible.
That led me to this classic piece, "Children of the Beats", written in 1995 by the son of one of Kerouac's lovers:
He tracked down and interviewed several of his literary 'cousins': other children of Beat writers and scenesters. If, like me, you are fascinated by how the lives of artists intertwine with family dynamics, that article is unputdownable. And profoundly sad. All of this material is tragic.
Through that I started reading about Lucien Carr, the golden boy of the Beats who had been their lead shaman—a few years before Neal Cassady showed up—until he stabbed a man to death under murky circumstances that a Hacker News comment is too short to get into:
That led me to reading about the children of Lucien Carr, one of whom—Caleb Carr—was a military historian who later became an accidental celebrity by writing "The Alienist", a 90s classic of the historical-serial-killer genre. Caleb Carr became an excellent writer, though as far from a Beat as a writer could be. He talks about the trauma field that he and his peers grew up in with painful eloquence.
He said this about his father and his buddies Ginsberg and Burroughs: "The one thing that their lifestyle did not factor in was family." To hear about that milieu from a child who had to deal with it all, decades later, is to me a entirely compelling thing.
He used the money from his bestsellers to buy a small mountain in rural New York and built himself an 18th century manor house refuge:
He died last year a month after his last book came out. His publishers thought they were getting another serial killer bestseller. Instead he delivered a memoir about his cat, whom this interviewer pushes him to agree was the love of his life:
His mother left Lucien Carr and married a man who had three daughters, who grew up with Lucien's three sons in what Caleb (middle son) called a "dark Brady Bunch".
Lucien lived for 11 years with Alene Lee, another former lover of Kerouac, and her daughter. A few years ago a blogger who is into Beat history did this interview with her (the daughter), which of all these pieces is probably the saddest, and which again I couldn't stop reading. If you can read this without your heart feeling assaulted, you're more resilient than I am:
The last rabbit-subhole I went down was the story of the son of William Burroughs, also named William Burroughs, who also wrote drug-phantasmagoric novels (one called "Speed"), had a liver transplant before he was 30, and died at the side of a road in Florida:
I was never attracted to the Beats aesthetically, except for Burroughs in a cobra-hypnotized way. But the mythology of the Beats as Bohemian free spirits has carried a lot of sway. There's a principle that the shadow side of the artist works itself out in the family. If you ever wanted to learn how this works, the Beat constellation is quite the case to study.
Here is what the son of Neal Cassady, the icon of beatific spontaneity, said in the 1995 interview I linked to above:
"By the 60's, Dad was so burned out, so bitter," John Allen says. "He told me once that he felt like a dancing bear, that he was just performing. He was wired all the time, talking nonstop. I remember once, after a party, about 2 A.M., he went in the bathroom, turned on the shower and just started screaming and didn't stop. I was about 15 then and I knew he was in deep trouble, that he was really a tortured soul. He died not too long after that."
Personal anecdote time, which enough time has passed that it can finally be told.
About 30 years ago, a family came down from the mountains near San Luis Obispo to ask whether my mother could teach them piano. They were an unusual family -- a mother and a number of children; apparently their father wouldn't leave his homestead up in the mountains. The children were all homeschoooled. They were perhaps a bit raggedy, but all quite brilliant and free-thinking, and quickly became excellent piano players. Our family became friends with theirs, and eventually we were invited to visit their homestead up in the mountains.
The homestead was an off-grid hand-built house and working organic dairy farm, lovingly stuffed to the rafters with various arts and crafts, including a large collection of medieval-style musical instruments which the patriarch of the family, Hal, had built by hand. Hal was an enigma within an enigma: he refused to talk about his past, looked like a Santa-clause mountain man, wouldn't engage with the outside world in person, but was relentlessly curious about it -- able to keep up with conversations about the latest in politics and technology. He also had a keen interest in the archaeology of the upper Colorado plateau, and soon we were making trips to the Cal Poly library to check out the latest archaeology books on his behalf. One day, on a whim, we looked for his name in the index of one of those books, and that's when we found out that we already knew who he was.
Haldon Chase[1] had been at the absolute epicenter of the Beat movement. He was the one who introduced Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac, and most of the other Beats to each other. He'd gone by pseudonym "Chad King" in "On the Road". At the time he didn't have a Wikipedia entry, and at the time all anybody knew is that he had vanished at some point. Of course my family felt privileged to know the rest of the story.
Thinking now about Hal's life, in the few retrospectives I've seen of it, he's framed as having rejected the whole Beat lifestyle. I'm not sure that's accurate. In many ways the life he managed to carve out for himself was the apotheosis of much of the beat philosophy: genuinely free-thinking, self-reliant, non-conformist, creative, and in his way, spiritual. All very Beat. What he certainly rejected was the the limelight. The publicity, the drama, the ego. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of that. So he managed to get away and just live a good (if unconventional) life. His kids have all gone on to live really good, non-messed-up lives as well.
So when reading stories about messed-up Beats and their messed-up kids, it's worth considering that there's a kind of anti-survivor-bias at play: where everything worked out, where the trauma didn't explode dramatically or get passed down the generations, you're probably not going to hear about it.
That's great story and a wonderful counterexample to what I wrote above. Thank you!
Edit: you got me thinking about one other counterexample, which is the part of the "Children of the Beats" interview with the daughter of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). She doesn't go into much detail but it definitely doesn't sound tragic.
You might be interested to hear that Carolyn Cassadi, Neal Cassadys wife at the time, wrote a book about her life with Neal and Jack. Not only did their lifestyle not consider family, they where in a complicated love triangle that neither of them was prepared for. A real challenge for Kerouac with his catholic upbringing. She also writes about how Kerouac very intentionally left some of his short comings out of his books. As Bukowski reportedly said: "I'm the hero of my own shit."
I guess Bukowski was more honest about his editorializing.
Either way, the book is called "Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg" [0] and is well worth the read. It might disnechant the beat authors for some, but at the same time it humanizes them.
The interview with Alene Lee daughter is very moving. Reminds me of a story, maybe it's in On the Road?, how Kerouac meets a guy in a Jazz Club and he invites him over to his place to drink some more beer. They wake up his wife by being loud, but she doesn't complain and Kerouac goes on about how she's such a good wife. Lot's of moments in the books like that if you're looking for them.
It's very interesting for me to look back on how I didn't really register those passages when I was reading Kerouac in my teens, being swept away by the radical and breathless enthusiasm of his writing. I probably was a huge shit head back then myself.. :D
I found that book before ever reading any Kerouac, and it indeed put me off.
Of possible interest to the "ramen profitable" set, there's a part in the book where she had no money and had heard you could live on just cabbage and peanut butter, so she does that for a month.
About fifty years ago, The Denver Post ran a series of articles about people who had known Cassady, Kerouac, and other beats in their Denver days. I remember about two things about the articles, one being that those still around to be interviewed had given up drinking.
Yes, I think we can sum it up as "Never meet your heroes". We tend to build an inaccurate image of those we look up to personally and the culture also builds a kind of communal shared false image for (probably all) popular figures like writers.
As a youngster I was really into Burroughs. He was presented to me by older people as great writer, a cool artistic sort of person like Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollok, but in the literary sphere. When you’re young you don’t have life experience yet, so if someone gets enough critical praise, you think they must be great. Boy is it hard growing up and realizing that not only does the emperor have no clothes, but the people you idolize are morally, intellectually and artistically bankrupt. I still really adore some of Ginsburg’s poems, there are some real gems in the dross. But Ginsburg was a legit pedo. Kerouac was an overrated drunkard. Burroughs killed his wife and seemed to have little to no remorse, arguably he was a sociopath. As you note, as a group they were horrible people, abusive parents, drunkards, pedophiles, junkies, but for me the most difficult realization was that they were artistic frauds and really not very talented, and even worse, that everything presented to me by authority figures about aesthetics and culture was complete bullshit. But that is the best sort of liberation, and the beats would approve of liberation from the baggage of the past so it sort of goes full circle.
I don't know that they were artistic frauds - perhaps one test for this is how their work lives on in other artists. From that point of view, Burroughs probably lives on in his paranoid way; Kerouac less so; Ginsberg I have no idea. But yes I hear you that if older people in your life handed you this stuff as anything to admire or live by, then the only self-enlivening response is to reject it completely.
It's very odd reading this because, to me, the Beats were never regarded well by authority figures, teachers, or other established credentialiers of literature that you interact with as a kid. They were seen as comic books, video games, etc. Junk for people who like junk.
I think the appeal of them was never that they had great, enviable lives. Ginsberg's famous refrain is that he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. Doesn't that resonate so much with young people, especially today, who have all the acumen, follow all the rules, and end up priced out of any kind of normal middle class life? Sure it's not the same thing the Beats faced, but isn't the idea of seeing a society from the outside and never being able to join (or for the Beats, wanting to join) isn't that common?
They were talented writers who didn't fit into the times they lived in, and who made choices that made their lives worse (and documented them extensively) and who reached for drink and drugs (and Eastern spirituality) to numb themselves at being in a world which they felt so apart from. How much different is that than many famous writers across many times and places in history?
Agreed with everything you've said, but I'd note that Tom Wolfe is definitely one of the talented ones to come out of that circle.
Ginsberg as you noted also had his moments of literary height. And I can appreciate some of the artistic merits of Burroughs' work as well, though as you note, he was either a sociopath or at least incapable of critical self-reflection in his writing.
On the Road, for whatever reason, was a complete miss for me.
There are others. Ferlingetti as just one example had some great stuff. That was the critical lesson for me: you have to evaluate works by big names with self blinding to the person’s reputation. Real life reviews aren’t that different from yelp. I ask myself, is a work good on its own, not because of who did it or what other people tell you to think or how often you hear the artist’s name referenced. Doing so opens a whole world of beauty and saves you from so much dreck and wasted time. So much is overrated and so much is underrated. There’s a lot to gain by understanding that and then seeking to refine one’s own sensitivity to what is good.
Ferlinghetti was remarkable. He started before the Beats and outlived them all. He said he wasn't a Beat poet but the City Lights Bookstore he co-founded gave them an outlet and a publisher. He published his last novel, Little Boy, when we was 100 years old.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/10/24/the-female-pi...
That's an intro to a novel by Jan Kerouac—Jack's daughter—which is newly reprinted. It (the intro) is well written and her (Kerouac's daughter's) story is incredible.
That led me to this classic piece, "Children of the Beats", written in 1995 by the son of one of Kerouac's lovers:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220408162741/https://www.nytim...
He tracked down and interviewed several of his literary 'cousins': other children of Beat writers and scenesters. If, like me, you are fascinated by how the lives of artists intertwine with family dynamics, that article is unputdownable. And profoundly sad. All of this material is tragic.
Through that I started reading about Lucien Carr, the golden boy of the Beats who had been their lead shaman—a few years before Neal Cassady showed up—until he stabbed a man to death under murky circumstances that a Hacker News comment is too short to get into:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Carr
That led me to reading about the children of Lucien Carr, one of whom—Caleb Carr—was a military historian who later became an accidental celebrity by writing "The Alienist", a 90s classic of the historical-serial-killer genre. Caleb Carr became an excellent writer, though as far from a Beat as a writer could be. He talks about the trauma field that he and his peers grew up in with painful eloquence.
https://www.salon.com/1997/10/04/cov_si_04carr/
He said this about his father and his buddies Ginsberg and Burroughs: "The one thing that their lifestyle did not factor in was family." To hear about that milieu from a child who had to deal with it all, decades later, is to me a entirely compelling thing.
He used the money from his bestsellers to buy a small mountain in rural New York and built himself an 18th century manor house refuge:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150529181658/https://www.nytim...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrt8Pir7jA
He died last year a month after his last book came out. His publishers thought they were getting another serial killer bestseller. Instead he delivered a memoir about his cat, whom this interviewer pushes him to agree was the love of his life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zqGaXl1Zg0#t=173
His mother left Lucien Carr and married a man who had three daughters, who grew up with Lucien's three sons in what Caleb (middle son) called a "dark Brady Bunch".
Lucien lived for 11 years with Alene Lee, another former lover of Kerouac, and her daughter. A few years ago a blogger who is into Beat history did this interview with her (the daughter), which of all these pieces is probably the saddest, and which again I couldn't stop reading. If you can read this without your heart feeling assaulted, you're more resilient than I am:
https://lastbohemians.blogspot.com/2022/04/christina-mitchel...
The last rabbit-subhole I went down was the story of the son of William Burroughs, also named William Burroughs, who also wrote drug-phantasmagoric novels (one called "Speed"), had a liver transplant before he was 30, and died at the side of a road in Florida:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs_Jr.
I was never attracted to the Beats aesthetically, except for Burroughs in a cobra-hypnotized way. But the mythology of the Beats as Bohemian free spirits has carried a lot of sway. There's a principle that the shadow side of the artist works itself out in the family. If you ever wanted to learn how this works, the Beat constellation is quite the case to study.
Here is what the son of Neal Cassady, the icon of beatific spontaneity, said in the 1995 interview I linked to above:
"By the 60's, Dad was so burned out, so bitter," John Allen says. "He told me once that he felt like a dancing bear, that he was just performing. He was wired all the time, talking nonstop. I remember once, after a party, about 2 A.M., he went in the bathroom, turned on the shower and just started screaming and didn't stop. I was about 15 then and I knew he was in deep trouble, that he was really a tortured soul. He died not too long after that."