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DENVER'S BEAT POETRY DRIVING TOUR
STOP 6: KEROUAC'S LAKEWOOD "HOMESTEAD"
(West Center Avenue, Lakewood)
Kerouac used his $1000 advance from his first published novel, The Town and the
City, and bought this house with the idea of moving his mother, sister and
brother-in-law to a "homestead" here. He'd spent the previous year fantasizing
about Colorado in letters to Denverite Ed White and others and the experiment
was, at one level, a failure: his family was unused to the west, felt dislocated
from their lives and friends back east, and moved back within a month to get
their old jobs back. Kerouac admitted to a friend that "I have spent my entire
one thousand dollars in this huge madness...I am doing a lot of writing however."
Alone, Kerouac, completed valuable research for On The Road and wrote some of it
in this house. Robert Giroux, his editor at Harcourt Brace, visited him here to
go over the proofs of The Town and the City. Kerouac left Denver for San Francisco
at the end of July and returned again in 1950 to visit friends and attend a
book-signing party at the Denver Dry Goods department store. The ubiquitous
photograph of Cassady and Kerouac side-by-side was taken just weeks after he left
Denver in 1949.
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