Gerald Nicosia was born just outside Chicago in 1949. Awarded a 4-year fellowship by UCLA in 1975 to work on his doctorate in American literature, Nicosia gave it up in order to pursue his own independent study of Jack Kerouac. Beginning his research in 1977, when almost everyone connected with the story was still alive, Nicosia traveled 50,000 miles back and forth across the North American continent, including Canada, with tape recorder in hand, to interview over 300 people who knew Kerouac. His biography Memory Babe, while still a work in progress, won the Distinguished Young Writer Award from the National Society of Arts & Letters. First published by Grove Press in 1983, it received over 200 reviews worldwide, including front-cover reviews in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times.
Many of those close to Kerouac praised the book highly. Michael McClure described Memory Babe as "beautiful, deep, seeing"; John Clellon Holmes called Nicosia a "great biographer" and deemed Memory Babe "essential for anyone interested in the development of postwar American literature"; William Burroughs claimed it was "by far the best of the many books published about Jack Kerouac's life and work, accurately and clearly written, with a sure feeling for Jack's own prose"; and Allen Ginsberg called it a "great book." Memory Babe appeared in later editions from Viking Penguin and the University of California Press, and it was subsequently translated into several languages, including French, Spanish, Czech, and Mandarin.
Having moved from Chicago to San Francisco in 1979, Nicosia became part of the post-Beat circle of poets in the Bay Area, and eventually numbered many of the Beat poets, including Jack Micheline, Harold Norse, Gregory Corso, David Meltzer, Lenore Kandel, and Janine Pommy Vega, among his good friends. He would also edit poetry collections by two of those friends, Cranial Guitar (1996) by Bob Kaufman and Teducation (1999) by Ted Joans. Beginning with Lunatics, Lovers, Poets, Vets & Bargirls, he also began publishing books of his own poetry, which now number five; and a sixth, called Beat Scrapbook, is forthcoming next year (2020). His poetry collection Night Train to Shanghai was widely praised, and Huffington Post reviewer Lionel Rolfe wrote that Nicosia "is a real poet, very much in the San Francisco tradition of Ferlinghetti, Patchen, Rexroth and Ginsberg." Rolfe compared Night Train to Shanghai to Blake's poems about America and said the book was "maybe even a great volume of poetry." Nicosia also organized and took part in hundreds of public poetry readings, for which he often worked with the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library and other Bay Area venues like the Unitarian Church and the Jewish Community Center, as well as famed private clubs like Sweetwater in Mill Valley.
Almost from the day of Memory Babe's publication, Nicosia, while continuing to do his own writing, began a second career of teaching and lecturing about Kerouac and the Beats, and later about the Vietnam War and the Sixties--work that has literally taken him around the world. Among the more than 100 colleges and universities where he has spoken are the University of Illinois, the University of Tennessee, Salem State University in Massachusetts, Evergreen University in Washington, NYU, UCLA; in England, Cambridge University, Chichester University, and the University of Exeter; the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in the Netherlands; the University of Chicago in Paris; and Sichuan University in Chengdu, China.
Nicosia participated in all the major early Beat and Kerouac conferences, including the Naropa Institute's 25-year anniversary celebration of On the Road (1982), the Beat Weekend at the Plymouth Arts Centre in England, (1987), the Rencontre Internationale Jack Kerouac in Quebec City (1987), and the dedication of the Kerouac Commemorative in Lowell (1988). He also gave the keynote address to the first annual convention of the European Beat Studies Network in 2012, and spoke again about Kerouac to the EBSN in Paris in 2017.
Another major area of Nicosia's studies is the Vietnam War and the recovery of its veterans. He spent more than twenty years involved with Vietnam veterans, their healing, and their activism, and numbered among his close friends many veteran leaders and writers such as Ron Kovic, W.D. Ehrhart, and Larry Heinemann. His work on and with veterans resulted in the landmark book Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement, which was published by Random House and selected by the Los Angeles Times in 2001 as one of the "Best Books of the Year."
Nicosia's work has extended to radio, television, and film. He is often interviewed on a wide variety of topics, has contributed to many documentaries on Kerouac and the Beats, scripted and narrated Chris Felver's West Coast: Beat and Beyond, and was an advisor to John Antonelli's Kerouac, the Movie as well as to Walter Salles's film adaptation of On the Road. Among Nicosia's other Beat-related books are Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory (2009), One and Only: the Untold Story of On the Road (2011), The Last Days of Jan Kerouac (2016), and most recently, a book on Jack Kerouac's legacy called Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century (2019). He has also written about Kerouac and the Beats for many academic journals, including the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Literary Criticism, the American Book Review, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, the unspeakable visions of the individual, and the Global Tapestry Journal in England. He has just finished a revised and updated edition of Memory Babe, which will be published next year by Cool Grove Press. He is also working with the family of Neal Cassady in the effort to publish Neal Cassady's long-lost Joan Anderson Letter, which was the model for Kerouac's On the Road.
In addition, Nicosia worked for decades as a journalist and book critic, publishing in such mainstream outlets as the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Times Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and USA Weekend. He taught journalism, as well, at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle in the 1980's.
His current major project is a critical biography of Ntozake Shange, to be published by St. Martin's Press.
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