Lucien Carr

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Lucien Carr (March 1, 1925 – January 28, 2005) was a key figure in the Beat generation, and later an editor for United Press International.

Carr was a roommate of Allen Ginsberg at Columbia University in the 1940s and met Jack Kerouac through Kerouac's then-girlfriend Edie Parker. He introduced both men to William S. Burroughs, whom he had known in St. Louis, Missouri.

Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death in an altercation in 1944, and pled guilty to manslaughter, explaining how he disposed of the body in the Hudson River. Carr had met Kammerer in St. Louis, and Carr stated in court that Kammerer had stalked him in a homosexual obsession. Carr was sentenced up to 20 years in prison for murder, but served only the minimum two years in the Elmira Correctional Facility in Upstate New York.

Kerouac was arrested as an accessory, after helping Carr to dispose of evidence, and bail was set for $2,500. Kerouac persuaded Edie Parker that he would marry her if she helped him make bail. Edie bailed Jack out of jail, and they were married. Their marriage was annulled only one year later.

In Jack Kerouac's The Town and the City, Carr is represented by the character "Kenneth Wood", and a more literal depiction of events appears in Vanity of Duluoz. According to the book The Beat Generation in New York by Bill Morgan, the Carr incident also inspired Kerouac and Burroughs to collaborate in 1945 on a novel entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which is to be published for the first time in November 2008.

After his prison term, Carr went to work for UPI, where he was initially hired as a copy boy in 1946. He became the night news editor in 1956 and went on to head the general news desk until his retirement in 1993. For a period, he was married to Kerouac's ex-girlfriend Alene Lee, on whom the character of Mardou Fox had been based in Kerouac's The Subterraneans.

After a long battle with bone cancer, Carr died at George Washington University Hospital after collapsing at his Washington, D.C. home.

The novelist Caleb Carr is Lucien Carr's son.