Jack Kerouac had written from New York that he would be going to San Francisco and would stop in Denver ... [...]

Jack’s brooding good looks and shy, gentle nature were comforting and attractive to me, but I considered him only a friend of Neal’s. He had clear blue eyes, emphasized by his black hair and eyelashes. His complexion was darker than Neal’s, whose skin was fair and extremely sensitive. We got along well in our roles of mutual friends of Neal, both equally programmed for monogamy and fidelity when it was a matter of matrimony. Jack came several times to the [Denver University] campus theater to watch rehearsals of the two plays some madness had possessed me to act in. I had discouraged Neal’s attendance: his opinion mattered too much, and I had no confidence in my ability as an actress, feeling only that the experience would be valuable in rounding out my career. Jack was complimentary and interested in the plays, and I was envied for the attention of this handsome stranger from New York. We were both shy and kept our conversation to general subjects, comparing tastes in playwrights, authors and movies and our impressions of New York and New England. When we rode home together on the streetcar, he would intrigue me by his astute observations of the people and places in the passing streets. He’d often jot down these impressions in a little five-cent notebook which, he told me, he carried with him at all times to capture details for his books. (Denver, 1947)

I surveyed the people moving in and out of the sleazy little grocery up ahead (dark, good-looking men in sport shirts, most of them, with bags full of beer), but saw no one I would have identified as the author of a novel, weighing twenty pounds in the hand, that was being seriously touted to publishers by people I respected.

But Kerouac was one of those men — the one who looked like the serious, tee-shirted younger brother of the others; the brother they were proud of because he played the violin as well as he played basketball; the young John Garfield back in the neighborhood after college, absolutely at ease there, but just as absolutely separated from it now by some weaning knowledge he could not communicate. He was making the run for more beer, he said with a hesitant smile, and, while [Alan] Harrington bought a contribution of big, brown quarts, he and I talked a little there on the sidewalk.

I don’t remember anything we said. It was probably no more than that gauging, neutral chat beneath which young men take each other’s measure, but I do remember my first impression. Under the boyish forelock, his strangely tender eyes noted me as we spoke, but all the time I felt that he was more keenly attuned to the tangled life of that street than to anything we were saying. It seemed to distract and stir him; he was at once excited and somehow emptied by it. Though he was just as straightforward, personable, buoyant, and attractive as I had been led to expect, there was a curious shyness under his exuberance; there was the touch of a moody thought around his mouth (like the reveler’s sudden foretaste of the ashen dawn to come), and, above all, there was that quietly impressive intensity of consciousness. All of which made me understand his friends’ enthusiasm in a flash: he was so evidently on his way toward some accomplishment, or some fate, that it was impossible not to warm to him immediately.

[...]

We became friends more quickly than I have ever become friends with anyone else. Everything about him was engaging in those days. He was open-hearted, impulsive, candid and very handsome. He didn’t seem like any other writer that I knew. He wasn’t wary, opinionated, cynical or competitive, and if I hadn’t already known him by reputation, I would have pegged him as a poetic lumberjack, or a sailor with Shakespeare in his sea locker. Melville, armed with the manuscript of Typee, must have struck the Boston Brahmins in much the same way. Stocky, medium-tall, Kerouac had the tendoned forearms, heavily muscled thighs, and broad neck of a man who exults in his physical life. His face was black-browed and firm-nosed, with the expressive curve of lip and the dark, somehow tender eyes that move you so in a loyal, sensitive animal. But it was the purity in that face, scowl or smile, that struck you first. You realized that the emotions surfaced on it unimpeded. Mothers warmed to him immediately: they thought him nice, respectful, even shy. Girls inspected him, their gazes snagged by those bony, Breton good looks, that ingathered aura of dense, somehow buried maleness. (New York, 1948)

The first time I met Kerouac was on a day not long after I had first met Bill [Burroughs]. I was hanging out in Washington Square Park when Bill and Jack walked by. Bill introduced me, and then told me he’d picked up something in the way of a narcotic and asked me if I knew anything about it. I can’t recall what the drug was but I had not heard of it. I didn’t think it was something I wanted to fool with, simply because I did not know what it was.

I remember thinking Jack was green, but he was taking everything in and making little comments to Bill — mostly about the scene in general. Kerouac was a typical clean-cut American type. He looked to me like the Arrow-collar man. They always had these clean-cut young progressive American businessmen in their ads with their hair cut neatly and a twinkle in the eye. That was Jack.

Bill invited us up to his room over the Waverly where we decided this drug was something that should be shot intramuscularly. We did shoot it that way, and nothing happened. Bill tried to talk Jack into shooting up, but Jack said no, he would pass on it, though he was obviously curious about it. And that time Jack would smoke a little pot, but he was leery of the needle. (New York, mid-1940s)

We all trooped uptown on a hot, muggy New York night. People were sitting on brownstone steps in their undershirts, drinking beer and fanning themselves — it was like a scene out of some low-budget gangster movie. [Alan] Harrington recognized one of the guests, dressed appropriately in a T-shirt and jeans, coming out of the tenement. He was on his way to replenish the beer, but stopped long enough for introductions. His name was Kerouac, a name I didn’t recognize, but he knew mine the minute [John Clellon] Holmes mentioned Neurotica. It felt good not being anonymous in Spanish Harlem. After he left, Harrington mentioned that he was one of the writers he wanted Holmes to meet. He evidently thought a lot of him, having heard from friends that Kerouac was one of the few good writers around, although he’d never been published. (New York, 1948)

The call, which was placed not by [Allen] Ginsberg himself but by Kerouac’s girlfriend, I at first thought must be a practical joke ("I’m here with Allen and Jack who would like you to come see them tonight"). But when Ginsberg got on the line, and the minute I recognized his voice and realized that this was no joke, practical or otherwise, I caught myself desperately fishing for some graceful way to avoid what was sure to be a very unpleasant encounter. [Podhoretz had attacked the Beats as "know-nothing Bohemians" in print.]

Ginsberg’s apartment turned out to be much as I would have imagined it: a walk-up in an aging building, sparsely furnished, and badly in need of a paint job. [...]

Kerouac was even handsomer in the flesh than in the pictures of him that had been appearing for months in such mass magazines as Life and Time. Unlike the others, all three of whom (especially [Peter] Orlovsky) were predictably and ostentatiously scruffy, his clothes, though casual, were neat and clean. Abnormally conscious as I was at that moment of the issue of personal appearance, and accustomed to the photographs in which he had always had a two-or-three-day growth of beard, I was also amazed to find him clean-shaven. Had he perversely cleaned himself up for this meeting, just as I had done? (New York, 1958)

I recall Kerouac in shoulder pads and cleats, stocky and hard-running ... In football uniform, short-legged, he seemed a kind of thug. He would drop back to handle punts and, catching them, go like the wind.

The school, Horace Mann, was in Riverdale, the northern suburbs of the city. [...]

Kerouac was one of the post-graduate students, "ringers," brought in very year to man the school teams. (...) Kerouac astonished us by submitting stories to the literary magazine, for a ringer an utterly unconventional art. He never came to the magazine’s offices, however. That would have been too out of character. (New York, 1939)

Romero’s wasn’t known as a literary bar, yet that first time I went there Sam [Astrachan] spotted a writer he knew at a table in the back and took me over to meet him. [...]

Wearing a red-and-black checked flannel shirt, with mussy hair and a day’s growth of beard, Kerouac seemed more lumberjack than literary man as he quickly offered to buy us a drink. He was celebrating an advance he had gotten for another novel. We sat down at a table with Kerouac and several of his friends, and Jack talked in the rather grumpy, desultory way he had, evidently his customary manner with people he’d just met. I took him to be a heavily serious sort of person, one who seemed more weighted down than elated about the sale of his novel to Viking Press, a prestigious publisher of fiction.

What most impressed me about Kerouac, though, was that he paid for our drinks by pulling a wad of bills from a money belt he wore around his waist that contained some of the cash from his $1,000 advance from the publisher. (New York, 1957)