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"The whole thing really begins in St. Louis." That's what Jack Kerouac said in a 1960 interview about the beginnings of what was later known as the "Beat Generation" (Aronowitz). Most accounts of the origin of the Beats focus on the meeting of Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in New York in early 1944, but Kerouac said it in fact began with the "St. Louis clique."' By that term he meant three friends-all of whom had grown up in St. Louis-who brought Kerouac and Ginsberg together: William S. Burroughs, David Kämmerer, and the much younger Lucien Carr. Burroughs, then 30, would go on to write Junky (1953), Naked Lunch (1959), and many other novels. Kämmerer, 33, had taught English at Washington University in St. Louis for a couple of years. Carr, 19, was a sophomore at Columbia University. Ginsberg later said that "Lu" Carr-who introduced Ginsberg, his floor-mate in a Columbia dorm, and later Kerouac, to his St. Louis friends-was "the glue."2
"The St. Louis clique" ended abruptly early on August 14, 1944, when after a night of drinking, Carr stabbed Kämmerer to death on the banks of the Hudson River near Columbia, reportedly (according to Carr) after the older man had made an unwanted sexual advance. Both Burroughs and Kerouac were called as material witnesses. As Ginsberg wrote in his journal the next day, "The libertine circle is destroyed with the death of Kämmerer" {Martyrdom 63). Amonth later Carr pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter.
The killing3 of Kämmerer is an oft-told tale.4 It received another fictionalized telling last year in the independent movie Kill Your Darlings, directed by John Krokidas from a screenplay by Krokidas and his Yale roommate Austin Bunn, and starring Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg is the central figure, with the entire story told from his point of view. Burroughs and Kämmerer play secondary roles. The presentation of Carr is not flattering, and his account of the killing is called into question. The appearance of the filmed version of the story, which includes some invented episodes, makes it timely to take a closer look at the verifiable facts in the case.
All printed accounts of the killing derive ultimately from the same sources, primarily the contemporary newspaper reports-eight stories about the...