by Jack Kerouac
3 Celine Young was Lucien Carr’s girlfriend at the time.
4 Lucien Carr spent the next two years in prison.
5 Allen Ginsberg had gone to college originally to become a labor lawyer.
6 The “new vision” was a term that Kerouac and Ginsberg’s small group of friends in Morningside Heights used to describe their own philosophy, which they hoped to express through their art. They picked up many of their ideas from Baudelaire’s notion of “poet as alchemist,” the Symbolists’ attitude of spiritual defiance, and Apollinaire’s l’esprit nouveau, which pitted “experimental” arts against growing social conformity.
7 Alfred Adler was a Viennese psychologist who split away from Freud’s methods during the early part of the twentieth century.
8 Lionel Trilling, an author and literary critic, was one of Ginsberg’s professors at Columbia.
9 That summer Kerouac had been hired to work at a summer camp, before finding a job closer to home as a soda jerk.
10 A reference to the Carr-Kammerer murder, which had taken place one year earlier, on the night of August 13-14, 1944.
11 PM was a socialist newspaper published in New York.
12 Both were fellow Columbia College students.
13 Prince Myshkin is the central character in The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. 7 Raskolnikov and Sonia are characters in Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
14 Ginsberg included two poems here that can be found reprinted as “The Poet: I” and “The Poet: II” in his The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice (DaCapo, 2006).
15 Mark Van Doren was a Columbia professor of English at the time to whom Ginsberg had shown his poem cycles The Denver Doldrums and Dakar Doldrums.
16 Justin Brierly was a Columbia alumnus from Denver who had recommended that both Hal Chase and Neal Cassady attend Columbia.
17 Kerouac is referring to a Ginsberg letter of mid-April 1948, which is not included in this volume.
18 Barbara Hale was Lucien Carr’s girlfriend at the time.
19 Ed White was a fellow Columbia student from Denver and an acquaintance of Neal Cassady. 6 Russell Durgin was the student in whose apartment Ginsberg was living at the time.
20 Saranac Lake, New York, in the Adirondack mountains, was the home of a famous tuberculosis sanatorium.
21 Allan Temko was a Columbia classmate of Ginsberg and Kerouac. One of their Denver friends, he later became an architectural critic in San Francisco, and won a Pulitzer prize.
22 Ginsberg was working for the journal of the Academy of Political Science.
23 A reference to Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West.
24 Tom Livornese was a student friend of Kerouac who knew Vicki Russell and Little Jack Melody. He was also a part-time jazz pianist.
25 Lennie Tristano was a jazz pianist and composer.
26 Lucien Carr had spent two years in an Elmira prison in upstate New York after pleading guilty to manslaughter in the death of David Kammerer.
27 Jinny Baker was a young girlfriend of Kerouac’s who appears as Jinny Jones in On the Road.
28 Victor Tejeira is described as Victor Villanueva in On the Road.
29 Earlier that year Seymour Lawrence, editor of the Harvard literary magazine Wake, had turned down “The Death of George Martin,” a section of The Town and the City.
30 David Diamond was a New York composer who appeared in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans as Sylvester Strauss.
31 Julien Sorel is the protagonist in Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black.
32 Carolyn Cassady had rented a house in San Francisco at 160 Alpine Terrace the previous summer while she was pregnant.
33 Adele Morales was a girlfriend of Kerouac, and later married Norman Mailer.
34 Richard Weitzner was a friend and fellow Columbia student.
35 Joe May was a gay friend of Ginsberg’s.
36 Harry Slochower was a professor at Brooklyn College and wrote many books, including No Voice Is Wholly Lost.
37 Ginsberg’s brother, Eugene Brooks.
38 Meyer Schapiro was an art historian who taught at Columbia University and the New School.
39 A reference to a letter that is now missing.
40 The Dancingmaster was a nickname they gave to Justin Brierly, a reference to his ability to manipulate people.
41 Kells Elvins was one of Burroughs’s oldest and closest friends.
42 Elbert Lenrow had been planning to take Kerouac and Ginsberg to the Museum of Modern Art to see a screening of Carl Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc before Allen’s arrest.
43 Harry Carman was a dean at Columbia University.
44 John Hollander was a Columbia classmate of Ginsberg, and became a poet and conservative literary critic.
45 “Birthday Ode,” written for the birth of Bill Burroughs’s son, was later retitled “Surrealist Ode” and published in Ginsberg’s The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice (DaCapo, 2006).
46 Walter Adams was a classmate of Ginsberg’s, and the son of poet Kathrin Traverin Adams.
47 Albert Schweitzer was a missionary, doctor, and theologian who later won the Nobel Peace Prize.
48 Jerry Rauch was one of their Columbia friends.
49 This is the first mention of Carl Solomon, to whom Ginsberg would address Howl.
50 Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes, was published in 1936.
51 Alan Harrington was a friend of Kerouac and Holmes who later wrote The Immortalist.
52 Kerouac had spent time in a Navy mental hospital in Bethesda during the spring of 1943.
53 LuAnne Henderson was Neal Cassady’s first wife.
54 Norman Schnall was an early friend of Ginsberg and Kerouac, and is mentioned in the scroll version of On the Road.
55 Sebastian Sampas was a childhood friend of Kerouac’s who died in combat during World War II.
56 Neal Cassady was staying with Diana Hansen, and they were splitting their time between her New York apartment and her mother’s in Poughkeepsie. They married later that year.
57 Zagg was one of Kerouac’s nicknames from childhood.
58 The Assyrian and Other Stories, by William Saroyan.
59 The Crippled Giant: A Literary Relationship with Louis-Ferdinand Céline, by Milton Hindus.
60 Texas, Li’l Darling is a musical by Johnny Mercer and Robert Emmett Dolan.
61 Jay Landesman, the editor of Neurotica, published their collaborative poem under Ginsberg’s name with the title “Song: Fie My Fum” in the spring 1950 issue.
62 Carl Solomon’s piece also appeared in the spring 1950 issue of Neurotica under the pseudonym Carl Goy.
63 Diana Hansen’s apartment, where Neal Cassady was staying, was on 75th Street in Manhattan.
64 Jack Fitzgerald was a classmate of Ginsberg’s at Columbia and a jazz aficionado.
65 Philip Lamantia was one of the poets who read at the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955.
66 Solomon, working at Ace Books for his uncle, A. A. Wyn, gave Kerouac a contract for On the Road, offering him a $1,000 advance, but Kerouac never signed it.
67 Alan Ansen was a friend and poet, at one time working as W. H. Auden’s secretary.
68 Gregory Corso became one of the leading poets of the Beat Generation.
69 Adler Place was a popular neighborhood bar in North Beach, San Francisco.
70 James Laughlin was the owner and publisher of New Directions Books.
71 Bill Garver was a small-time thief and drug dealer befriended by Burroughs.
72 The Manhattan House of Detention in lower Manhattan was commonly referred to as “The Tombs.”
73 Henri Cru was a classmate and friend of Kerouac’s at Horace Mann who appeared as Remi Boncoeur in On the Road.
74 John Hoffman was a poet who died in Mexico in 1952 at the age of 24.
75 VVV was a magazine of Surrealist writing, published from 1942 to 1944.
76 Gene Pippin was a Columbia classmate.
77 Sara Yokley was a girlfriend of Kerouac’s.
78 Cassady had struck LuAnne Henderson on the head and injured his thumb. It became infected, and a portion was amputated.
79 In 1949, Kerouac had hoped to join a group of his Denver friends—Ed White, Bob Burford, Allan Temko, and others—who were all living in Paris
80 Jaime de Angulo was an author and expert in anthropology and Native American culture.
81 Martha Gellhorn was a novelist and war correspondent, and was married to Ernest Hemingway.
82 Kerouac was trying to avoid Joan Haverty, his second wife, during this period.
83 Dave Tercerero was Burroughs’s friend and drug connection in Mexico City.
84 Dick Davalos was a friend and actor with whom Ginsberg had a brief affair.
85 At the time Kerouac was calling this manuscript On the Road, but it was later published as part of Visions of Cody.
86 Barry Ulanov was a jazz critic and an early supporter of bebop.
87 Only one letter is included in this volume: the letter dated February 19, 1953, on page 189.
88 Martha Foley was the editor of Story magazine.
89 Malcolm Cowley, American writer, editor, and critic. An editorial consultant to the Viking Press, his support of On the Road was instrumental to its publication.
90 Bob Merims was an engineer and friend of Lucien Carr.
91 Alan Eager was a jazz musician whom Ginsberg and Kerouac knew from New York.
92 Paul Rotha was a British documentary filmmaker and critic.
93 Jerry Newman owned Esoteric Records and taped Kerouac reading his work. He appeared as Danny Richman in Visions of Cody.
94 The Cassadys had discovered the teachings of the American mystic Edgar Cayce.
95 Karen Horney was a psychologist and the author of Our Inner Conflicts.
96 Chester Kallman was a companion of W. H. Auden.
97 Kenneth Rexroth was an influential poet and writer who lived in San Francisco.
98 Buddhism in Translations, by Henry Clarke Warren.
99 Stanley Gould worked for A. A. Wyn and was the model for “Portrait of a Hipster,” by Anatole Broyard.
100 Marcel Proust’s patron was Baron de Charlus.
101 An arhat is a Buddhist monk who has attained Nirvana.
102 This peyote vision was the original inspiration for Ginsberg’s poem Howl.
103 Cassady’s epic, 13,000-word “Joan Anderson Letter” was written in December 1950. In it Neal described a brief affair he had, in a narrative style that profoundly altered both Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s methods of writing. The letter was later lost, but segments were used as the basis for The First Third, Neal’s autobiography and only book.
104 In his September 5, 1954, letter, Ginsberg told Kerouac that he had shown Robert Duncan a copy of Essentials of Spontaneous Prose. Kerouac was afraid Duncan might steal his ideas.
105 Kerouac suffered from a debilitating form of phlebitis.
106 On May 3rd Kerouac had sent a postcard saying, “Please send all the manuscripts to me care of this address soon as convenient . . . Giroux has asked to see my B-works and so I want all my manuscripts now.”
107 “Dream Record: June 8, 1955.”
108 Keith Jennison was an editor at the Viking Press, who, with Malcolm Cowley’s support, convinced the house to buy On the Road.
109 Peter Orlovsky hitchhiked to New York in order to pick up his teenage brother Lafcadio. Their mother was on the verge of committing the mentally handicapped boy to a mental institution.
110 Mark Schorer was a professor at UC Berkeley who later would testify in the trial of Howl in support of City Lights.
111 “Aich” meaning H, slang for heroin.
112 It was Kerouac who had suggested that Howl would be a good title for Ginsberg’s poem. Allen had earlier called it Strophes.
113 For a while, Burroughs took pleasure in torturing cats, but in his later years he became a devoted cat lover.
114 Jonathan Williams was the owner of Jargon Press.
115 Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi, had unexpectedly left him $1,000 in her will.
116 Life magazine planned to do an article on the San Francisco Renaissance.
117 Thomas Parkinson was a professor at UC Berkeley and the editor of A Casebook On The Beat, one of the early Beat anthologies.
118 Gui was Jaime de Angulo’s daughter.
119 Ruth Witt-Diamant was a patroness of the arts and the founder of the San Francisco Poetry Center.
120 Mademoiselle was featuring the Beat Generation in an illustrated article and Kerouac posed for his picture with a crucifix around his neck, which caused some controversy.
121 Ginsberg’s book Howl and Other Poems was seized by the San Francisco Customs Inspector when it arrived from the British printer. Later in May, the case against the publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was dropped after Ferlinghetti decided to order a second printing of the book made in the U.S. to circumvent the jurisdiction of the customs agents. This strategy worked until June, when the San Francisco Police Department arrested Ferlinghetti for publishing and selling obscene material.
122 Robert MacGregor was the managing editor at New Directions.
123 Orlovsky was receiving monthly veteran disability checks due to his medical discharge from the Army.
124 Pavel Smerdyakov is one of the characters in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov.
125 Panama Street was a well-known area of prostitutes and brothels in Mexico City.
126 Ginsberg continued this letter for several pages, giving Kerouac a complete rundown of his trip through Spain and France. He wrote extensively about European and Indian trips, but because Jack never responded to the specifics of these letters, the editors have not included them in this volume. This particular letter can be found reproduced in toto in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (DaCapo, 2008), pp. 158-168.
127 Gilbert Millstein’s glowing review of On the Road in the New York Times made it a best seller and launched Kerouac’s career.
128 Ernest von Hartz was Lucien Carr’s father-in-law.
129 KiKi was a young boyfriend of William Burroughs in Tangier.
130 Beat Generation was published in 2005.
131 The Mistral Bookshop was owned by George Whitman, an old friend of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
132 This is a reference to the poet Ray Bremser, who was in this New Jersey jail at the time.
133 John Foster Dulles was the U.S. secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
134 Garens was Ginsberg’s nickname for Snyder.
135 Jay Landesman owned a nightclub in St. Louis, which offered poetry readings as well as more traditional entertainment.
136 The Five Spot was a jazz club on the Bowery.
137 Connie was Al Sublette’s wife.
138 Irving Rosenthal was an editor for the Chicago Review.
139 These are references to several anthology projects Ginsberg had proposed to Kerouac.
140 Robert Lowry was an editor and novelist who wrote reviews for The Saturday Review.
141 Léon Robinson was a character in L. F. Céline’s first novel, Journey to the End of Night.
142 Ginsberg was annoyed that the first portion of his review of The Dharma Bums appeared in the November 12, 1958, issue of the Village Voice farther back in the newspaper than the second portion.
143 Patricia McManus was the publicity director at Viking Press.
144 Johnny Nicholson was a wealthy restaurateur and friend of Kerouac’s.
145 Kerouac had been asked by Avon to edit a book of contemporary poetry. Although he worked on it and mentioned it in the next few letters, it was never published.
146 Ginsberg volunteered to take part in experiments to study the effects of LSD on the human brain. It was to be his first exposure to the drug.
147 Capote had dismissed Kerouac’s work, saying, “That’s not writing, it’s typing.”
148 Marc Schleifer was the editor for Kulchur magazine.
149 Paul
Carroll was one of the founders of Big Table magazine in Chicago.
150 Bickford’s was a cafeteria on Times Square where Ginsberg washed dishes and many of his friends hung out.