Joplin and Kerouac: The Writer Who Captures Them Both

“Back then, when we all first read him, white male privilege was taken for granted. But how we felt about books then and returning to them now—well, it’s not an easy answer,” Holly George-Warren tells me in a phone conversation from her home near Woodstock, NY. The "him" she refers to is the legendary Jack Kerouac. Right now, George-Warren is currently immersed in the King of the Beats, as she's writing an authorized biography of him for Viking Press.

When we talk, we are coming up, in days, on what would have been the 100^th birthday—March 12—of dashing, roiling but complicated Kerouac, whose image had whipsawed over the course of his life. As a fabulously handsome young man, he had inspired a dramatic turn from ‘50s conventionality to ecstatic, turbulent, Buddhist-tinged hedonism. What romantic young or very young woman didn’t love that he’d written On The Road in three weeks, typing on a humongously long scroll of paper, and had emoted that “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time”?