Jimmy Breslin on Kerouac: Get Him a Box of Periods!
Yesterday's Clip Job (an excerpt every day from the Voice archives) featured a dispatch from a writer by the name of James Breslin who chronicled Jack Kerouac's visit to Brooklyn College in March of 1958. Curious as to whether this Breslin was the Pulitzer Prize-winner who later wrote under the byline Jimmy Breslin, I asked the Voice's Tom Robbins about it. And he put in a call to the man himself.
It's not the same Breslin. But, as you might have guessed, Jimmy had a little something to say about Jack:
"It is not me. I knew Kerouac he lived in Richmond Hill, on 134th, near 101st.... The Philadelphia Inquirer, gave him the whole roll of UPI [teletype] paper so he could just keep typing. I should've given him a fucking box of periods. Taught a whole generation how to write run-on sentences. A disgrace!"
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