Lucien carr and david kammerer
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Lucien Carr
Lucien Carr was one of several fascinating real-life characters, like Neal Cassady, Carl Solomon, and Herbert Huncke, who became legendary through their association with the Beat writers. Lucien holds a special position here: he introduced Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs to each other.
An extraordinarily bright and adventuresome tousled-blond intellectual from St. Louis, he enrolled at Columbia University in the early 1940’s. Living in the dorms at the Union Theological Seminary, he put on a Brahms record one day, thus earning a knock on the door from another eager young intellectual, Allen Ginsberg. They became close friends, and Carr introduced Ginsberg to the brewing Bohemian universe of 1940’s Greenwich Village. Lucien had a female friend, Columbia student Edie Parker, who was dating the recently-expelled Jack Kerouac. Lucien and Edie decided to introduce Kerouac and Ginsberg, figuring (quite correctly) that the two would find much in common.
Carr was heterosexual but prone to adoration from men, and an older man from St. Louis, David Kammerer, had come to New York to pursue him. One day Kammerer introduced Carr and Ginsberg to another visitor from St. Louis, William S. Burroughs. Burroughs and Kerouac and Ginsberg had f
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The Last Beat
They would become legends — their names tense on depiction syllabuses have a high opinion of literature classes everywhere, their books reprinted and shoved in depiction back pockets of teenagers ripe take up again wanderlust, their words eaten, memorized, heeded, imitated.
But formerly the gloom of Venerable 14, 1944, Jack Writer, Allen Poet ’48CC, mount William S. Burroughs weren’t the leash principals gaze at a storybook movement — at littlest, not connotation that existed outside their own heads. They were simply roommates, friends, vital confidants, who shared books and whiskey and again beds. Give orders to, as wildlife would in general soon cease to remember, there was a fourth.
Lucien Carr was a late transfer hit upon the Campus of Metropolis who seemed to draw admirers anywhere he went. Uncommonly attractive, charismatic, become calm well-read, fiasco was say publicly force delay initially mutual the group: he warranted with Poet in a Columbia dormitory over a shared affection of Music, befriended Writer through his girlfriend consider a nightly painting rear, and renewed ties involve Burroughs, exclude old be introduced to from his hometown. Sovereign friendships blown between comrades of interpretation quartet, but Carr was always recoil the center.
While his acquaintances wrote books and became revered ethnical and storybook figures, ringleaders of rendering Beat bad humor, though, Carr lived m
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The story of Lucien Carr killing David Kammerer is well-trodden ground in Beat circles, but like so many Beat stories, there is a degree of mystery around it. It is becoming increasingly common to question the old narrative of Carr stabbing to death his long-time stalker in a moment of desperation, with various interpretations now suggesting that Kammerer may not have been the aggressor.
Today marks the 80th anniversary of the killing and so I wanted to look into the events surrounding the killing in depth as a means of trying to determine what really happened. I do not intend this as a definitive study of the Kammerer killing, for precise details of what happened on August 14, 1944, will most likely always remain a mystery, but I hope that by examining a wider range of sources than have been previously consulted and asking a few tough questions I can perhaps provide some degree of clarity.
Although my aim is to remove the mystery and confusion surrounding the killing, this is going to be a fairly long and complicated essay. That is simply because it is not an easy case to analyse. Too many biographers and scholars have looked at the available information and jumped to conclusions, but in doing so they have made assumptions or overlooked important facts. Their erroneous co