Kill Your Darlings

The title is a reference to the often-misquoted advice of Arthur Quiller-Couch, that writers must be willing to edit out their most finely written passages if they fail to serve the piece as a whole: "Murder your darlings."

The story is about the college days of some of the early members of the Beat Generation (Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac), their interactions, and Carr's killing of his long-time friend David Kammerer in Riverside Park in Manhattan, New York City.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Jack Kerouac's essential reading list

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/jack-kerouac-essential-reading-list/ 

The Inner Ear

"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"
Jack Kerouac
http://www.brainyquote.com/

Neal Cassady

AP EXCLUSIVE: LETTER THAT INSPIRED KEROUAC FOUND
BY JOHN ROGERS 
ASSOCIATED PRESS

  "It's been called the letter that launched a literary genre - 16,000 amphetamine-fueled, stream-of-consciousness words written by Neal Cassady to his friend Jack Kerouac in 1950... Kerouac described it this way: 'It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better'n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves.' "

Big Sur

see Big Sur trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w71t2lFXDU

Your Household Bookcase

"Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac"

Gerald Nicosia

Original publication by Grove Press 1983

Reprinted by University Of California Press 1994

 

   The image and legacy of Jean-Louis Kerouac are writ large upon American history, and not merely in the obvious areas of literature and popular culture. As another Beat biographer has noted, Jack Kerouac, along with his friends Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs tapped into the very essence of some important historical truths in the post World War II period, "verities far beyond the ken of the middle class."

  Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe stands as the most complete and exhaustive biography of the man and his times. Further, each of Kerouac's major works are highlighted and analyzed by the author with both perception and detail.
   
  As Jack's friend John Montgomery (the real-life Morley of The Dharma Bums) put it in the dedication of a book of essays about Kerouac addressed to Nicosia, the author of Memory Babe "took flak for the truth." Nicosia still is as witnessed by some truly unfortunate battles -- legal and otherwise -- with the family of Jack's last wife Stella. By all accounts, it would seem that the Sampas family (executors of the Kerouac estate, a fact that in itself has been questioned and challenged) is going about selling off anything and everything Kerouac came in contact with to the highest bidder while simultaneously giving Nicosia the bum's rush.

Johnny Depp may be in possession of Jack's old overcoat, but those who take the time to read Memory Babe will have something infinitely more valuable.

-Bob Schaeffer