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"John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of Kerouac's life they were--in Holmes's words--""Brother Souls."" Late one night as they sat talking, Kerouac spontaneously created the term ""Beat Generation"" to describe this new attitude they felt stirring around them. Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation is the remarkable chronicle of this cornerstone friendship and the life of John Clellon Holmes. From 1948 to 1951, when Kerouac's wanderings took him back to New York, he and Holmes met almost daily. In a burst of creation in April 1951, he drew all the materials he had been gathering into the scroll manuscript of On the Road. Biographer Ann Charters was close to John Clellon Holmes for more than a decade. At his death in 1988 she was one of a handful of scholars allowed access to the voluminous archive of letters, journals, and manuscripts Holmes had been keeping for twenty-five years. In that mass of material waited an untold story. Through the pages of Holmes's journals, often written the morning after the events they recount, Charters discovered and mined an unparalleled trove describing the seminal figures of the Beat Generation: Holmes, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and their friends and lovers."

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Samuel Charters (1929-2015) was an eminent historian of jazz and blues music and author of the award-winning The Roots of the Blues and numerous other titles. He was also a Grammy-winning record producer, musician, poet, and fiction writer and was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1994. Ann Charters is professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut, where she taught for more than thirty years. She is the author and editor of numerous books on writers of the Beat Generation, including Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation?, The Portable Beat Reader, and Kerouac: A Biography. Armed with an English degree and a burning love for the scent of libraries and old books, Justin Price has spent the last few decades uncovering the essence of story. This diligence has instilled him with a knack for telling tales. Justin is a noir-themed storyteller with a penchant for comedy and dark thoughts. His devotion to creeping inside the minds of characters shows in his colorful narration. He lives in sunny Florida with his loving family, but longs for a haunted mansion somewhere dreary and destitute. Brian Holden grew up in Traverse City, Michigan, went to college in Ann Arbor, and lived in Los Angeles just long enough to forever hate the winters in Chicago. In addition to running his theater company, StarKid Productions, he performs improv comedy. But no, he can't tell you a joke. Only by responding truthfully in the moment is he absolutely hilarious. He loves reading and is happy that he's gotten to lend his voice to some great stories so far.

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