John Clellon Holmes (1926–1988)

John Clellon Holmes was a novelist and poet known primarily for helping to define the “Beat Generation” of writers. He taught creative writing and literature at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) from the mid-1970s until 1987.

John Clellon Holmes was born on March 12, 1926, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, to John McClellan Holmes Sr. and Elizabeth  Franklin Emmons (Betty) Holmes. He had two sisters. During the Great Depression, Holmes’s father moved through a variety of odd jobs, with the family income supplemented when Holmes took a job delivering milk during high school. He dropped out of high school in 1942 and briefly took a job in the Reader’s Digest subscription department before moving to New York City to work a summer Wall Street clerical job and attend a non-degree General Studies program at Columbia University, where he honed his passion for reading and writing.

In June 1944, during World War II, Holmes was drafted into the U.S. Navy. Serving for a year, he was trained as a medic and was assigned to a San Diego naval hospital that treated sailors wounded in battles in the Pacific. He spent his last six months in the navy working at St. Albans Naval Hospital in Queens, New York. Fifty of the men Holmes treated in New York died, while hundreds of others survived, severely maimed. He was traumatized by the experience. “When I worked there, and thought there, and lived there, something inside me grew cold with terror. It was as if in all the fantastic unreality I had come to know reality at last,” Holmes wrote. His trauma triggered migraine headaches. He became a patient himself at St. Albans and was given a medical discharge. While on leave in August 1944, Holmes married Marian Milliambro, a woman three years older, whom he met while working at Reader’s Digest.

At the end of the war, Holmes, who had no high school diploma, finagled his way into Columbia University literature and philosophy classes while he worked to turn himself into a professional writer. By May 1948, Holmes, who used the pen name “Clellon Holmes” to distinguish himself from another writer named John Holmes, had his first published poem in the prestigious Partisan Review. A couple of months later, Holmes met another aspiring writer, Jack Kerouac, best known for the iconic 1957 roman à clef On the Road in which Holmes appears as the character Ian MacArthur.

Holmes is credited with defining the “Beat Generation” in a 1952 New York Times article in which he wrote: “The origins of the word ‘beat’ are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than a mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw.” That same year, he published his most well-known novel, Go, a semi-autobiographical work depicting the Beat Generation. He received a substantial advance for the paperback rights of the book, half of which went to his wife Marian, who had filed for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Holmes married Louisiana native Shirley Allen in 1953.

In addition to Go, Holmes wrote several other novels and books of poetry. He made a living in large part through what he described as “gypsy teaching,” which took him to UA for a 1966 spring semester as a writer-in-residence for the beginnings of a graduate-level program in creative writing. He also lectured or taught at the University of Iowa, Brown, and Yale.

Holmes was invited back to UA in 1975 and, in 1977, became a tenured faculty member. His obituary in the New York Times suggested that Holmes was a founder of the creative writing department at UA, but it is only clear that he was on its faculty.

Holmes died of cancer on March 30, 1988, in Middletown, Connecticut; Shirley died on April 12, 1988.

For additional information:
Charters, Ann and Samuel. Brother-Souls; John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

Holmes, Clellon. “This Is the Beat Generation.” New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952. Online at https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1952/11/16/170386792.html (accessed April 18, 2024).

McQuiston, John T. “John Clellon Holmes, 62, Novelist and Poet of the Beat Generation.” New York Times, March 31, 1988. Online at https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/31/obituaries/john-clellon-holmes-62-novelist-and-poet-of-the-beat-generation.html (accessed April 18, 2024).

Jeff Waggoner
Nassau, New York