Mike Hennessey was browsing used books and came across John Clellon Holmes' 1952 novel - sometimes said to be the "first Beat novel" - Go, opened it up and found graffiti scrawled by someone - presumably a young man - named Brian Zimmerman. Perhaps Brian was required to read Go in high school? "What Would Patton Say?" he asks (rhetorically) in one outburst. At right is a close-up; below, at left, you can see the title page as Brian, incensed by the obviously communist propaganda, has written over and through it. Unlike Brian, the novel says: "I actually yearn for life to be easy, magic, full of love."
And elsewhere: "You know what I just dreamed? I dreamed about everybody I know.... I honestly never realized how many people I know. Too many goddamn people. You know what I mean?"O Brian, dream such a dream.
It was to Holmes that Kerouac once said, "You know, this is really a beat generation." Jack in turn had gotten the term from Herbert Huncke.
In 1958 Holmes published The Horn, which is considered by many to be the definitive jazz novel of the beats.
I've written about Holmes here before.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
