The Washington Post, January 8th, 1987
When I read the other day that the City Council of Lowell, Mass., had just decided to build a new park dedicated to the memory of Jack Kerouac, my first reaction was amazement. Though born in Lowell, Kerouac was not just a local boy who made good. As the leading novelist of the Beat Generation, he "spit forth" (to borrow a phrase from the leading Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg) a series of books heaping abuse on the way of life lived in, precisely, places like Lowell. That way of life he represented as hardly better than no life at all. It was, he said-most famously in "On the Road" and then again ...
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