ABSTRACT
Allen Ginsberg's little volume of poems, Howl, which got the San Francisco renaissance off to a screaming start a year or so ago, was dedicated to Jack Kerouac (“new Buddha of American prose, who spit forth intelligence into eleven books written in half the number of years … creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature”), William Seward Burroughs (“author of Naked Lunch, an endless novel which will drive everybody mad”), and Neal Cassady (“author of The First Third, an autobiography … which enlightened Buddha”). So far, everybody's sanity has been spared by the inability of Naked Lunch to find a publisher, and we may never get the chance to discover what Buddha learned from Neal Cassady's autobiography, but thanks to the Viking and Grove Presses, two of Kerouac's original classics, On the Road and The Subterraneans, have now been revealed to the world. When On the Road appeared last year, Gilbert Milstein commemorated the event in the New York Times by declaring it to be “a historic occasion” comparable to the publication of The Sun Also Rises in the 1920's. But even before the novel was actually published, the word got around that Kerouac was the spokesman of a new group of rebels and Bohemians who called themselves the Beat Generation, and soon his photogenic countenance (unshaven, of course, and topped by an unruly crop of rich black hair falling over his forehead) was showing up in various mass-circulation magazines, he was being interviewed earnestly on television, and he was being featured in a Greenwich Village nightclub where, in San Francisco fashion, he read specimens of his spontaneous bop prosody against a background of jazz music.
