Ernest Hemingway died 65 years ago today (July 2, 1961). Although one does not typically think of him as having influenced the Beat writers, there were certainly some connections.

>Hemingway was a very, very great technician, and a good head and a real sharp mind, and basically a very sympathetic person.
--Allen Ginsberg

>The Snows of Kilimanjaro [...] is one of the best stories in the language about death. [...] The end deserves a place among the great passages of English prose, with the end of Joyce’s The Dead and the end of The Great Gatsby.
--William S. Burroughs

>God how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life.
--Jack Kerouac

>I wish them all good luck.
--Hemingway on the Beat writers

Although the quotes above are mostly positive, their opinions varied and they could be extremely critical, particularly of Hemingway's macho attitude and the dialogue in his novels. You can read all about the links between Hemingway and the Beats in this new essay: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/hemingway-and-the-beat-generation

>How about a real broadside attack on the Beat—to be published by City Lights? Wd you be interested? A short book—or pamphlet?
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Kenneth Rexroth, March 14, 1959

By 1959, both Ferlinghetti and Rexroth were sick of the Beat Generation and, in particular, they were tired of being associated with the media’s “beatnik” obsession.

Rexroth did not take Ferlinghetti up on his offer but continued to write vicious (and often quite unfair) attacks that were published elsewhere, and he occasionally gave nasty quotes to tabloid journalists. He loathed Kerouac in particular and sometimes wrote brutal reviews of his books for major newspapers.

Ferlinghetti was eager to distance himself, too, and offered Rexroth the chance to write a full-on “attack on the Beat” that would no doubt have confused visitors to City Lights Bookshop, which was already very much associated with the movement (most notably as the publisher of Howl and Other Poems). In the same letter, he congratulated Ferlinghetti on an earlier “put-down of the mushroom beats.”

Both men spent much of the rest of their lives angrily denying paternity of the Beat Generation but their complaints were mostly ignored and numerous headlines called them each “the father of the Beat Generation.”

For a full account of Rexroth’s difficult relationship with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, see this essay: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/honest-advice-wanted-allen-ginsberg

>I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed, with real names in his case, however (being letters).
--Jack Kerouac

This is from Kerouac's Paris Review interview. He goes on to talk about the Joan Anderson letter that Cassady had sent him, calling it "the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better'n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves." This letter, which was lost for many decades, was finally published in 2020.

Photo by Carolyn Cassady

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photo Pete Hoffman

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