Huffington Post: How the 'Beat Generation' Got Away from Kerouac

One of the many surprises tucked away in the vast Jack Kerouac Archive at the New York Public Library is the tiny pocket notebook in which Kerouac reacted in the fall of 1947 to a conversation he'd just had with his mother. She had been horrified by a story in her morning paper about bands of abandoned children living in caves in a remote part of Italy, who were ravaging the countryside in their search for food and having sex and babies as early as 13. Jack's mother wanted the Pope to step right in and put a stop to this. Her son wrote in his notebook: "I want to go there."

Not long afterwards a reference to the "cave children of Italy" would appear in Jack's extremely important unpublished letter to a young Hemingway acolyte named Allan Temko that I came upon as I worked on my new Kerouac biography, The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. That letter dated December 14, is a manifesto that seems to be Kerouac's first written statement of what the Beat Generation meant to him.