''When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School'' is Sam Kashner's autobiographical account of his experience as the first student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

which was founded by

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Genera ...

and Anne Waldman in honor of their late friend,

Jack Kerouac Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Of French-Canadian anc ...

. As he describes in his book, Kashner was a disgruntled Long Island teenager in the 1970s who was obsessed with the poetry and prose of the

Beat generation The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generat ...

of the 1950s. Kashner's book provides a glimpse into the lives and creative processes of his teachers at the Jack Kerouac School, including

Anne Waldman Anne Waldman (born April 2, 1945) is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political acti ...

William S. Burroughs William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular cultur ...

and

Gregory Corso Gregory Nunzio Corso (March 26, 1930 – January 17, 2001) was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement. He was the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burrough ...

. Among the various and curious details of life with the Beats, Kashner describes several of Ginsberg's unfinished poems that he asks Kashner to complete. He also recalls the lively conversations at his teachers' dinner parties, which touched on their methodologies as well as American Literature in general. Kashner also chronicles the lingering effects of heroin and other drugs on Burroughs and Corso, as well as

William S. Burroughs, Jr. William Seward Burroughs III (July 21, 1947 – March 3, 1981) was an American novelist, also known as William S. Burroughs Jr. and Billy Burroughs. He bears the name of both his father and his great-grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, t ...

's alcoholism. Kashner's book was published by

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News C ...

in 2004 and was reviewed favorably by ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' the same year.

External links

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References

2004 books Literary autobiographies HarperCollins books {{lit-bio-book-stub