The Fifties

by David Halberstam

writer Jack Kerouac and a friend got drunk and drafted a message to the President: “Dear Eisenhower, We love you—You’re the great white father. We’d like to fuck you.” The original group had come together at Columbia University in upper Manhattan. The most successful students at Columbia—those who fit in easily at an elite Ivy League school—regarded them as outcasts. Everything about them was wrong: their clothes, their manners, their backgrounds. In truth, they were a rather unlikely amalgam of friends. Allen Ginsberg was an awkward, shy but enthusiastic seventeen-year-old from New Jersey who couldn’t quite decide whether to be impressed by Columbia or to make fun of it. In December 1943 he met Lucien Carr, who had recently transferred from the University of Chicago. Carr was playing Brahms on a player in his room, and Ginsberg, lonesome and bored, knocked on Carr’s door. “I heard music,” Ginsberg began. “Did you like it?” asked Carr. “I thought it might be the Brahms Clarinet Quartet,” Ginsberg said. “Well, well!” Carr said. “A little oasis in this wasteland.” Carr opened a bottle of wine. Ginsberg was dazzled, not least by Carr’s blond good looks.