Is a Former Buffalo All-American Responsible for
Igniting the “Beat” Movement?

According to Levi Asher, author of "Columbia: The Birthplace of the Beat Movement," former Buffalo All-American tackle and Columbia University head football coach Lou Little may be inadvertantly responsible for launching the literary genre known as the “Beat Movement.”

“What could be less ‘beat’ than Columbia University?” asks the author. “This grand old Ivy League university may not even want to be the birthplace of the Beat Generation, but the fact is that a young man named Jack Kerouac enrolled there on a football scholarship in 1940.”

Kerouac was a rebellious sort, and found himself constantly at odds coach Little. The highly-respected Little, himself an author of two books about football, would have the last word, at least on the field.

“Kerouac was an exceptional football player,” Asher writes, “but he fought bitterly with Little, and dropped out when he realized the coach was snubbing him on purpose.”

The future author of “On The Road” continued to hang around campus, and eventually fell into a friendship with another Columbia student named Allen Ginsberg. “Thus was the Beat Generation born.”

But that fateful friendship might never have happened had it not been for Lou Little’s intolerance for Kerouac’s attitude, the same attitude that would one day turn the literary world on its ear.

("Columbia: The Birthplace of the Beat Movement," was written by Levi Asher and appears on the “Literary Kicks”)

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