BrotherSouls, Ann Charters
BrotherSouls, Ann Charters
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

Brother-Souls
John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation

Author: Ann Charters, Samuel Charters

Narrator: Brian Holden

Unabridged: 19 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/27/2024


Synopsis

John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of Kerouac's life they were—in Holmes's words—"Brother Souls." Late one night as they sat talking, Kerouac spontaneously created the term "Beat Generation" to describe this new attitude they felt stirring around them. Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation is the remarkable chronicle of this cornerstone friendship and the life of John Clellon Holmes.

From 1948 to 1951, when Kerouac's wanderings took him back to New York, he and Holmes met almost daily. In a burst of creation in April 1951, he drew all the materials he had been gathering into the scroll manuscript of On the Road.

Biographer Ann Charters was close to John Clellon Holmes for more than a decade. At his death in 1988 she was one of a handful of scholars allowed access to the voluminous archive of letters, journals, and manuscripts Holmes had been keeping for twenty-five years. In that mass of material waited an untold story. Through the pages of Holmes's journals, often written the morning after the events they recount, Charters discovered and mined an unparalleled trove describing the seminal figures of the Beat Generation: Holmes, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and their friends and lovers.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Eric on January 20, 2016

Back when I started really digging into the beat writers, I found a quiet affinity with John Clellon Holmes, probably because he was the (apparent) square of the set of Kerouac/Burroughs/Ginsberg. He's been under-appraised over the years - a Dutch monograph here, a reissue there. I remember the plea......more

Goodreads review by Todd on December 17, 2015

At long last, a biography that sheds light on the Beat Generation's true founding member and sardonic wit, John Clellon Holmes. Though the bio includes a lot of Kerouac material already covered by Charters and other biographers (one assumes putting Kerouac in the title helped with sales), the primar......more

Goodreads review by GK on March 22, 2014

Superb.......more