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 did some sportswriting for the Spec, and had a weird relationship with Allen Ginsberg.
On Columbia housing
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.'" [2]
On hanging out in Morningside Heights
Among other places around the neighborhood, Kerouac frequented the West End, Mondel's Chocolate, and Riverside Park. He noted that he:
- "...hung around with Mike Hennessy as I say on that corner in front of the candy store on 115th and Broadway with William F. Buckley Jr. sometimes. Hobbled down to the Hudson River and sat on Riverside Drive benches smoking a cigar and thinking about mist on rivers..."[3]
On another occasion, Kerouac recalled
- "the soft city evenings, the cries of 'Rimbaud!', 'New Vision!', the great Gotterdamerung, the love song 'You Always Hurt the One You Love,' the smell of beers and smoke in the West End Bar, the evenings we spent on the grass by the Hudson River on Riverside Drive at 116th St. watching the rose west, watching the freighters slide by." [4]
