Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac,
Columbia Undergraduates
 

A
 

ANN CHARTERS

^LLEN GINSBERG and Jack Kcrouac are back at Co¬
lumbia again, after an absence—except for a few brief
reappearances—of more than twenty years. Among the
least academic alumni in the College's history, nonetheless they are
probably two of the most significant contemporary American
writers to have cut Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren's lec¬
tures in order to read what they wanted in their dormitory rooms
on Morningside Heights. The Allen Ginsberg Collection of let¬
ters, books, magazines, photographs, and manuscripts has recently
been deposited in the Columbia Libraries, and among its thousands
of items are notes and letters that give a vivid glimpse of the ex¬
perience of Ginsberg and Kerouac as Columbia undergraduates.

Kerouac came first, after a year at Horace Mann School, enter¬
ing Columbia as a Freshman on a football scholarship in the fall,
1940. But, as Ginsberg wrote his brother Eugene from Hamilton
Hall four years later. Jack "left college when he couldn't take the
philistinism of Lou Little [the football coach], the piggish prig-
gishness of the football players, and the restrictions of academic
life." Kerouac, whom the Columbia Daily Spectator sports writer
called "probably the best back on the field," had the bad luck to
break his leg in the second game of his freshman season. On Octo¬
ber 31, 1940, the newspaper ruefully reported that the team's
"hopes were darkened by the news that Jack I<Cerouac, star back,
will be out with a leg injury for the rest of the season." The fol¬
lowing year, the "fleet-footed backfield ace" lasted less than a
month on the varsity team. Columbia's football stars were enlist¬
ing or being drafted into the Armed Services, and in the line-up