Free Republic

LOWELL — Jack Kerouac was born March 12, 1922, and Lowell’s native son would go on to inspire the Beat Generation. To officially mark the life and legacy of Kerouac’s work, three federal lawmakers are introducing a resolution to remember Kerouac in advance of his 100th birthday on Saturday. U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Third, of Westford, will shepherd the resolution in the House. Democrat Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren will sponsor the resolution in the Senate. In an interview Wednesday, Trahan said the Mill City can be seen throughout Kerouac’s writings. She recalls Kerouac’s description of the St. Jean...

Philip Adam, a visitor from England, was walking down Columbus Avenue shortly after 1 p.m. Sunday, March 24, when he fell into a line of people that jammed the entrance to City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. “Are they giving something away?” he inquired. They were. At that moment, renowned North Beach poet Jack Hirschman was standing on the floor of the famous bookstore, giving away his reading of the Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem “At Sea.” It was a rare occasion that drew crowds of people who were pressed into the shelves, down the stairs to the cash registers and out the...

It can be easy to be jaded about the Beat writers in San Francisco, but even the most indifferent literary snob would be hard-pressed to walk away from "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg" at the Contemporary Jewish Museum without feeling fuzzy inside. Organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and running through September, "Beat Memories" is a collection of about 80 photos taken by Ginsberg and his friends in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s. Nearly every image is notated with the wobbly handwriting of Ginsberg, who added paragraph-length captions to the images in the 1980s...

Since it is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's ground-breaking book, "On The Road," many are using the occasion to reminisce about the author. However, Tom Hayden is using this anniversary as a way to lament in the Huffington Post over the fact that Kerouac was too much of an iconoclast to buy into his collectivist leftwing agenda: Having set the stage for the '60s, Kerouac seems to have gone missing which at first I thought odd, but it made perfect sense because he defined himself as a loner on the margins. Suddenly confronted with the possibility...