Now that I'm back in LA, I've been drowning in work once again, and unable to post too much to the blog. So I thought it would be fun to end this week with an off-topic post that's been in my head a little while.

Back in college, I wrote a senior thesis (in history) on the creation of what became known as the Beat Generation. Not many people know that Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs all met in the early 1940s while Kerouac and Ginsberg were students at Columbia University, and Burroughs lived in the Village.

At the start of my senior year, I went out to dinner with my academic advisor, Jim Shenton (now deceased). Jim arrived at Columbia in 1946, fresh from his experience in WWII (as a pacifist, Jim served as a medic, participating in, among other actions, the liberation of Buchenwald), supported by the GI Bill. And, he didn't leave until he died. So, by 1997, Jim was a living legend, having personally experienced half a century of Columbia history.

I told Jim that I was having trouble honing in on a topic, and I was considering dropping the thesis (which was an option in the history major). That's when he started telling me about this fellow named Lucien Carr.

Jim had never met Lucien -- they missed each other on campus by just a few years. But Jim clearly recalled the mystique his colleagues and fellow students held towards Lucien, when Jim first arrived on campus. And he recalled to me the basics of the narrative:

Lucien Carr had transfered to Columbia as an undergraduate in the early 1940s. By all accounts, he was immensely gifted -- particularly as a poet and thinker -- and was also given to behavior that was quite out of the norm for the period.

Lucien had known William Burroughs from the time when both lived in St. Louis, and Lucien met both Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac as fellow students at Columbia. And thus, Lucien introduced these three individuals to each other, establishing the 'Libertine Circle', which later served as the foundation for the Beat Generation.

The story of their interaction together is pretty fun on its own terms. These were some pretty crazy folks, and they were focused on testing the boundaries of cultural norms -- using drugs, poetry and sex as fuel in their quest. And, while the word 'Beat' was still quite some time away, the movement didn't just happen -- these folks were very self-consciously styling a movement (named by Carr as the 'New Vision') from way back in the early 1940s.

Despite Lucien's vital role as the match-maker for the Libertine Circle, and its intellectual leader for this early period, Lucien dropped out very suddenly. And it's the story of his dropping out that I believe is really the creation moment of the Beat Generation.

The Libertine Circle also sort of included a fellow named David Kammerer. Kammerer was (I jest you not) Carr's former scout master, and, it seems, harbored a rather unhealthy fascination for Carr over a period of many years. Kammerer, consumed with Carr, had moved to New York to follow Carr when Carr transferred to Columbia.

And, one night in 1944, Carr murdered Kammerer in Riverside Park, and dumped his body in the Hudson River.

One day later, Carr turned himself in, and received a two year conviction; he pled guilty, portraying the attack as self-defense against an aggressive homosexual who threatened to kill him -- the New York papers called in an 'Honor Slaying' in their front page headlines (though some say the fact that the fact that the New York District Attorney was also a Columbia Trustee may have played some role since the University had a real desire to shut this story down as quickly as possible).

In between the time of the murder, and when Carr turned himself in, he first visited Burroughs, who provided some advice, before spending several hours with Kerouac (the details of which are recounted in some detail in Kerouac's novel 'Vanity of Dulouz'). Kerouac was shortly thereafter arrested as an accessory after the fact, though he was fairly quickly released; he dropped out of school and traveled to Michigan, before returning to New York to try to start his career as a writer. And Allen Ginsberg held his very first press conference (Ginsberg, too, tried to write a novel about the events, but the Columbia administration forbade its conclusion).

Carr never returned to Columbia. He never returned to the Libertine Circle. And he never was a beat. When I wrote my thesis, he was still an editor at UPI, and he is now deceased. (His son is Caleb Carr, whose fantastic, best-selling novel, 'The Alienist' is -- somewhat disconcertingly -- about a serial killer in New York City).

In my thesis, I recount this history in significantly more detail, integrating history and literature to make the argument that Lucien Carr was a vital (if essentially entirely overlooked) force in the establishment of the Beat Generation. He brought the key intellectual figure heads of the Beat movement into dialogue with each other, he provided inspiration and direction in that very early period, and the tragedy of the Kammerer's demise provided, it seems, the sort of traumatic shock that kick-started the actual path to the beat.

Looking back at this paper, 12 years later, I remember the process of writing it across a full year as probably my fondest and most fulfilling academic experience. I got to dive into the primary sources at the New York Public Library (having one of their private reading rooms to yourself, to scour through Kerouac's and Ginsberg's diaries and private correspondence was a pretty remarkable time) and Columbia's primary sources collection. I interviewed some really interesting people. And, as I wrote the thesis, I was living in the same dorm that Kerouac had inhabited during the 1943-44 academic year (it seemed significant to me at the time).

And I got to tell a pretty much untold story (really the gold standard for a history thesis) -- that I happen to think is also really interesting.

So, despite that the writing is 12 years old, from when I was 21, and that I haven't touched or edited it since (it's the same exact version you can find archived at the Columbia University Library), I thought it would be fun to post it up here for anyone who might be interested in this topic.

So here it is.

Share and enjoy!

-r