With its proximity to the cultural hub of New York City and its quieter suburban and rural landscapes, Connecticut was fertile ground for artists and writers in the period of Modernist movements between 1913 and 1979. Many of these cultural figures are well known through biographical and critical studies. Creative Places seeks to show how place played a significant role in creative work, and how in turn the artists and writers influenced communities in Connecticut.
John Clellon Holmes
Education/Curation, Fiction, Poetry
1926 – 1988
- Biography/Description of Work
A resident of Old Saybrook from the mid-1960s, John Clellon Holmes was a writer and poet of the Beat Generation. Friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg since 1948, his novel “Go” (1952) fictionalized his experiences with them and Neal Cassady. In 1958 he wrote a novel about a jazz musician, creative, visionary but tragic, entitled “The Horn.” He also lectured at Yale University in 1959, at the writers workshop at the State University of Iowa in 1963, at Brown University in 1971, and at the University of Arkansas in 1976 for several years.
- Sources view
- Wikipedia NY Times obituary. [ http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/31/obituaries/john-clellon-holmes-62-novelist-and-poet-of-the-beat-generation.html ] Lehman, Eric D. and Amy Nawrocki. 2014 Literary Connecticut. Charleston: The History Press.
- Associated Resource(s)
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