"When I first met Jan Kerouac"

Nicosia's forthright and energetic defense of Jan Kerouac has won him many friends and allies, such as Al Aronowitz, Buddah and Paul Blake Jr. Equally, it has made him many antagonists, such as David Bowers, David Amram and Frank Shifreen. Others, such as John Cassady and Ron Whitehead, feel that although Gerry's heart is in the right place, he might catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Gerald Nicosia's home site:http://www.geraldnicosia.com/

"Home to War" is Gerald Nicosia's most recent book: http://www.oz.net/~vvawai/sw/sw43/Home_to_War.html

Cosmic Baseball Association on Nicosia
http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/nicosia7.html

Cosmic Baseball Association on Nicosia
http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn/IKL/GerryBio.html

Gerald's most recent book, "Home to War"
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/05.17.01/nicosia-0120.html

Gerry gets ejected with Jan from NYU Kerouac Conference: http://www.ishmaelreedpub.com/Nicosia.html

Three of Gerry's poems (3)
http://www.corpse.org/issue_11/poesy/nicosia.html

Gerald Nicosia's biography of Jack Kerouac, "Memory Babe," is a massive testament to Kerouac's life and works. When I first read it in the mid-1980s it inspired me to go back and re-read Kerouac and to read the books I hadn't yet read. An exhaustive critical biography, "Memory Babe" is rich with anecdote, insight, and contains a cast of characters that Jack never mentioned in his books.

Gerry was instrumental in organizing and fighting Jan Kerouac's campaign to seize control of the Jack Kerouac Estate from its owners, the Sampas family of Lowell Massachusetts.

Years later, on March 12 1997, I was surfing the net looking for tape recordings Kerouac made of a series of wild, stoned conversations between himself and his famous "On the Road" travelling companion and mentor Neal Cassady. I didn't find the tapes -they had long since turned to dust- but I found an article describing Jan Kerouac's attempts to claim ownership of her father's literary archive. The article was by Gerald Nicosia, and went on to describe Jan's ejection from a conference held at New York University in 1995 honoring the life and works of Jack Kerouac.