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Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation. Ann Charters and Samuel Charters (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2010)
In February 1958, John Clellon Holmes wondered in his journal why he was not as widely known as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In fact, he began to wonder why he seemed to be excluded from general consideration as one of the Beat writers. He was, after all, one of Kerouac's closest friends who had been the first person to read On the Road as a fresh roll of typescript, who had published the first Beat Generation novel, Go, in 1952, and who had thereafter been asked to explicate the Beat ethos in a widely read New York Times Magazine essay. In the fall of 1961, University of California professor Thomas Parkinson published A Casebook on the Beat that included literary works by the now-expected cohort (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William S. Burroughs, etc.) and essays by the likes of Kenneth Rexroth, Norman Podhoretz, Warren Tallman, Herbert Gold, and others. Yet Parker included neither Holmes' literature nor his commentary.
As the Beat mystique grew in the years following Kerouac's death in 1969, Holmes was resurrected in the roles of observer and commentator, providing details in interviews and essays on a group of writers and confederates whose past was hazed over by alcohol and drugs, faulty memories, and the mythologizing consequences of legends told and retold. Holmes came to be seen as a less galvanizing writer than Kerouac had been, yet at the same time as a more reasonable chronicler of events. Some of the qualities that vitalized Kerouac as an enthralling book writer - his unrestrained and uninhibited literary manners - were the very qualities that made him unsuitable to serve the media as a spokesperson for his generation, let alone for his coterie of writers. Newspapers and magazines and soon biographers and scholars looked to Holmes for his reportage and his insights, since he had been an intimate part of the scene but did not seem to live the Beat lifestyle to the point that it rendered him incapable of producing considerate responses to their queries. Biographer Barry Miles declared that even in the late 1940s Holmes had been capable of navigating...