n the evening of October 21, 1969, Allen Ginsberg received a telephone call from the journalist Al Aronowitz: Jack Kerouac had died, earlier that day, in a Florida hospital. For Ginsberg, it was the second such call in just over a year and a half. On February 10, 1968, he had learned that Neal Cassady, the inspiration for “On the Road” and, aside from Kerouac, Ginsberg's closest friend, had died, in Mexico.
The Kerouac news deeply saddened Ginsberg but did not surprise him. Kerouac's heavy drinking over the previous decade had increased to such an extent that his closest friends wondered if he had a death wish. Ginsberg and Kerouac had grown distant—largely because Kerouac had become less and less available to Ginsberg, but also because Ginsberg no longer wished to be around his old friend, who, on any given night, could be a belligerent, unhappy, argumentative, and nasty drunk. Kerouac had remarried, bought a house for his wife and his invalid mother, and moved to Florida, where he lived a semi-reclusive life.
Read Full Article »