John Clellon Holmes

Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts on March 12, 1926, John Clellon Holmes wrote stories, poems, reviews, essays, and articles that appeared in major magazines and literary journals throughout the world. He’s perhaps best known for three novels—Go (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), The Horn (Random House, 1958), and Get Home Free (E. P. Dutton, 1964)—and the essay/memoir collection Nothing More to Declare (E.P. Dutton, 1967), a definitive work about the Beat movement and other eruptive post-World War II cultural shifts. These books were later followed by several more collections of poems and essays. His books have been translated into Danish, German, Italian, and Swedish, and have had wide circulation in the United Kingdom. He died of cancer at 62 on March 30, 1988.