DENVER'S BEAT POETRY DRIVING TOUR "...Denver, it's all rickety fences and backyards and incinerators smoking in that blue morning air, but also soft sad dusk at dark...I came to feel that the alleys, the fences, the streets were the "holy Denver streets" I called them, and just because of this particular softness."                     - Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody Denver and the Beats Certain cities and certain writers are linked in the minds of readers: Oxford, Mississippi means just one man: William Faulkner. Paris in the Twenties signifies F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Similarly, Chicago belongs to Carl Sandburg, Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow. Say the word "Harlem" and one thinks about Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. For Denverites who have been swept up at some point in their reading lives by the works of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, it's a well known and beloved fact - though this will be news to most Coloradans and most Americans - that Denver possesses a fascinating slice of the Beat Generation's history, and it all comes down to one man and one summer: Neal Cassady and the summer of 1947. Introduction The Beat Generation, the Beats, Beatniks, all Beatific Stop 1 Civic Center Park Stop 2 The Colburn Hotel Stop 3 Sonny Lawson Baseball Field Stop 4 Southwestern Corner Drive Drive Through Larimer Street Stop 5 My Brother's Bar & Confluence Park Stop 6 Kerouac's Lakewood "Homestead" Footnotes About the Author, Additional Resources and Credits These suggested stops are ordered in a way that makes emotional, historical and geographical sense (there's even a specific Beat site that includes lunch!). These stops are best viewed in daylight hours. Drive safely and have fun!