You'll Be Okay ─ My Life with Jack Kerouac

Edie Parker was 18 years old when she met Jack Kerouac at Columbia University in 1940. A young socialite from Grosse Point, Michigan, she had come to New York to study art, and quickly found herself swept up in the excitement and freedoms the big city offered a sheltered young woman of that time. Jack Kerouac was also 18, attending Columbia on a football scholarship, and impressing his friends with his intelligence and knowledge of literature. Jack and Edie fell in love and quickly moved in together, sharing an apartment with Joan Adams (who would later marry William Burroughs). This is the story of their life together in New York, where they began lifetime friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and others. Edie's memoir provides the only female voice from that nascent period, when the leading members of the Beat Generation were first meeting, filled with the excitement of wild hopes and new ideas.