Jack Kerouac and me

I first read Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road back” in high school in the early ’70s. The book was first published in 1957, the year before I was born. Kerouac, who was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, spent some formative years in New York City. In fact, he attended Horace Mann School in 1939. He spent one year at the prep school, which has been at the same site in the northwest Bronx since 1914. Kerouac played football at Horace Mann that year while commuting from Brooklyn, where he was staying with an aunt. According to Ruth Zeligmann, Jack Kerouac also lived in a dorm near the Henry Hudson Parkway.  

At Columbia University, Kerouac continued his athletic career. However, it was shortened when he suffered a broken leg on the gridiron. He met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Lucien Carr while frequenting clubs and bars in the Village. At such clubs as the Village Vanguard, the Five Spot and the Red Lion, where David Amram and Kerouac appeared back in the late ’50s and early 1960s, they began to hone their skills and artistic relationship. Kerouac did lyrics and Amram did music for “Pull My Daisy,” a Robert Frank film. 

Upon reading Kerouac’s “On the Road,” one is swept into his world of adventure, nonconformity and free-spiritedness. I, a Bronxite who has lived in the borough for over five decades, was fascinated to learn that Kerouac owed a great deal of his literary strength and vitality to the city itself, which he loved.

I recently spoke to David Amram, who met Kerouac in 1957. Amram relayed a story about him and the writer hanging out in the Village at clubs on Bleecker Street. Kerouac loved to walk the city, mostly at night, where they frequented jazz clubs and house parties. Amram shared some photos of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and himself with me. He mentioned that he first met Kerouac at a small club called the Five Spot in lower Manhattan where Kerouac would read material he had written. They gathered in these small clubs with such artistic luminaries of the time as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Miles Davis and Jackson Pollock to usher in the Beat Generation.