Jack Kerouac

See also Wikipedia's article about "Jack Kerouac".

Jack Kerouac came to Columbia on a football scholarship, but went literary after a broken leg his first year [1]. He's now known as the Beat Generation author who wrote On the Road. While at Columbia, Kerouac also had a weird relationship with Allen Ginsberg.

Housing choices

Kerouac moved from Hartley to Wallach Hall (then Livingston), which he much preferred, due to its superior view of Butler and its comparative lack of cockroaches. In his autobiography Vanity of Duluoz he expressed his satisfaction with the move from Hartley:

"One great move I made was to switch my dormitory room from Hartley Hall to Livingston Hall where there were no cockroaches and where b'God I had a room all to myself, on the second floor, overlooking the beautiful trees and walkways of the campus and overlooking, to my greatest delight, besides the Van Am Quadrangle, the library itself, the new one, with its stone frieze running around entire with the names engraved in stone forever: 'Goethe ... Voltaire ... Shakespeare ... Molière ... Dante.' That was more like it. Lighting my fragrant pipe at 8 P.M., I'd open the pages of my homework, turn on station WQXR for the continual classical music, and sit there, in the golden glow of my lamp, in a sweater, sight and say, 'Well, now I'm a real collegian at last.'"