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| Brother-Souls
ISBN: 9781604735802
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University Press of Mississippi
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Beat generation.; Authors American;
John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of Kerouac's life they were--in Holmes's words--"Brother Souls." Both were neophyte novelists, hungry for literary fame but just as hungry to find a new way of responding to their experiences in a postwar American society that for them had lost its direction. Late one night as they sat talking, Kerouac spontaneously created the term "Beat Generation" to describe this new attitude they felt stirring around them. Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation is the remarkable chronicle of this cornerstone friendship and the life of John Clellon Holmes.
From 1948 to 1951, when Kerouac's wanderings took him back to New York, he and Holmes met almost daily. Struggling to find a form for the novel he intended to write, Kerouac climbed the stairs to the apartment in midtown Manhattan where Holmes lived with his wife to read the pages of Holmes's manuscript for the novel Go as they left the typewriter. With the pages of Holmes's final chapter still in his mind, he was at last able to crack his own writing dilemma. In a burst of creation in April 1951, he drew all the materials he had been gathering into the scroll manuscript of On the Road .
Biographer Ann Charters was close to John Clellon Holmes for more than a decade. At his death in 1988 she was one of a handful of scholars allowed access to the voluminous archive of letters, journals, and manuscripts Holmes had been keeping for twenty-five years. In that mass of material waited an untold story. These two ambitious writers, Holmes and Kerouac, shared days and nights arguing over what writing should be, wandering from one explosive party to the next, and hanging on the new sounds of bebop. Through the pages of Holmes's journals, often written the morning after the events they recount, Charters discovered and mined an unparalleled trove describing the seminal figures of the Beat Generation: Holmes, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and their friends and lovers.
Samuel Charters was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on August 1, 1929. After serving in the Army during the Korean War, he spent time in New Orleans, where he played clarinet, banjo and washboard in bands and studied with the jazz clarinetist George Lewis. He received a degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. His first book, The Country Blues, was published in 1959 and was released in tandem with an album also entitled The Country Blues. His other books included The Roots of the Blues, The Legacy of the Blues, The Poetry of the Blues, The Bluesmen, Jazz New Orleans, A Language of Song: Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora, Songs of Sorrow, and The Harry Bright Dances. He also produced albums including Chicago: The Blues Today! and the first four albums by Country Joe and the Fish. He published several poetry collections including Things to Do Around Piccadilly and What Paths, What Journeys as well as several novels including Louisiana Black and Elvis Presley Calls His Mother After the Ed Sullivan Show. He also translated works by Swedish authors and wrote a book in Swedish entitled Spelmannen, about Swedish fiddlers. He died of myelodysplastic syndrome, a type of bone marrow cancer, on March 18, 2015 at the age of 85. (Bowker Author Biography) |
