Gerald Nicosia (born November 18, 1949, in Berwyn, Illinois) is an American author, poet, journalist, interviewer, and literary critic. He is based in Knoxville, TennesseeKnoxville]], Tennessee. [1]
Nicosia received a B.A. and an M.A. in English and American Literature, with Highest Distinction in English, from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1971 and 1973 respectively. [2]
Nicosia has written book reviews for the past 25 years for many major American newspapers, including The Washington Post , the Chicago Tribune , The Kansas City Star , the San Francisco Chronicle , the Oakland Tribune , and the Los Angeles Times .
Nicosia is best known as a biographer of Jack Kerouac. [3] His highly regarded Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (1983) was reissued in March 2022 with new material by Noodlebrain Press. He had also been an advocate and supporter of the late Jan Kerouac, Jack's estranged daughter. In January 2009, Nicosia edited and published Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory , containing photos and written essays and remembrances about her. [4]
In 2001, Nicosia's book Home to War was published and covers the problems faced by Vietnam Veterans returning to an ungrateful nation. It also discusses the battle to stop the use of Agent Orange. [5] In 2020, Nicosia's book "BEAT Scrapbook" was published by coolgrove press. It contains highly personal poems by the author, many of which poems are addressed to Beat literary icons Nicosia knew as colleagues and friends. [6]
Nicosia is currently working on a full-length critical biography of the pioneer black writer Ntozake Shange, which will be published by St. Martin's Press. [7]
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
Neal Leon Cassady was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic and counterculture movements of the 1960s.
On the Road is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator Sal Paradise.
Robert Frank was a Swiss photographer and documentary filmmaker, who became an American binational. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ ... ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.
Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935–46 is a 1968 semi-autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac. The book describes the adventures of Kerouac's alter ego, Jack Duluoz, covering the period of his life between 1935 and 1946. The book includes reminiscences of the author's high school experiences in Lowell, Massachusetts, his education at Columbia University, and his subsequent naval service during World War II. It culminates with the beginnings of the beat movement. It was Kerouac's last work published during his life. The tone of the book has been noted for its stark contrast to On the Road.
Janet Michelle "Jan" Kerouac was an American writer and the only child of beat generation author Jack Kerouac and Joan Haverty Kerouac.
Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. She was born Joyce Glassman in 1935 to a Jewish family in New York City and raised in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, a few blocks from the apartment of Joan Vollmer Adams where William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac lived from 1944 to 1946. She was a child actress and appeared in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama, which she writes about in her 2004 memoir Missing Men.
Desolation Angels is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac, which makes up part of his Duluoz Legend. It was published in 1965, but was written years earlier, around the time On the Road was in the process of publication. The events described in the novel take place from 1956-1957. Much of the psychological struggle which the novel's protagonist, Jack Duluoz, undergoes in the novel reflects Kerouac's own increasing disenchantment with the Buddhist philosophy. Throughout the novel, Kerouac discusses his disenchantment with fame, and complicated feelings towards the Beat Generation. He also discusses his relationship with his mother and his friends such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Lucienn Carr and William S. Burroughs. The novel is also notable for being a relatively positive portrayal of homosexuality and homosexual characters, despite its use of words that were at the time considered homophobic slurs.
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is a novel by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. It was written in 1945, a full decade before the two authors became famous as leading figures of the Beat Generation, and remained unpublished in complete form until 2008.
Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg is an autobiographical book by Carolyn Cassady. Originally published in 1990 as Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg, it was republished by London's Black Spring Press, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Off the Road recounts the history of Carolyn Cassady, wife of Jack Kerouac's traveling companion and On the Road's hero Neal Cassady. As Neal's wife and Kerouac's intermittent lover, Carolyn Cassady was well situated to record the inception of the Beat Generation and its influence on American culture.
Richard Gustave Stern was an American novelist, short story writer, and educator.
Mexico City Blues is a long poem by Jack Kerouac, composed of 242 "choruses" or stanzas, which was first published in 1959. Written between 1954 and 1957, the poem is the product of Kerouac's spontaneous prose technique, his Buddhist faith, emotional states, and disappointment with his own creativity—including his failure to publish a novel between 1950's The Town and the City and the more widely acclaimed On the Road (1957).
Beat Generation is a play written by Jack Kerouac upon returning home to Florida after his seminal work On the Road had been published in 1957. Gerald Nicosia, a Kerouac biographer and family friend has said that theatre producer Leo Gavin suggested that Kerouac should write a play; the outcome being Beat Generation.
Tom Clark was an American poet, editor and biographer.
Richard William McBride was an American beat poet, playwright and novelist. He worked at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers from 1954 to 1969.
Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. Kerouac used the name "Duluoz Legend" to refer to his collected autobiographical works.
Chicago Review is a literary magazine founded in 1946 and published quarterly in the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago. The magazine features contemporary poetry, fiction, and criticism, often publishing works in translation and special features in double issues.
Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation is the third and final spoken word album by the American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, released in January 1960 on Verve Records. The album was recorded during 1959, prior to the publication of Kerouac's sixth novel, Doctor Sax.
Joan Haverty Kerouac, born Joan Virginia Haverty, was the second wife of writer Jack Kerouac and the author of an autobiography, Nobody's Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats. Joan Kerouac's autobiography, which existed only in manuscript form when she died, appeared in book form in 2000 after the Kerouacs' only child, Jan Kerouac, her half-brother, David, and David's brother-in-law John Bowers helped prepare it for publication.