Gerald Nicosia

Born November 18, 1949, in Berwyn, Illinois, just outside Chicago, Gerald Nicosia received a B.A. (1971) and an M.A. (1973) in English and American Literature, with Highest Distinction in English, from the University of Illinois in Chicago. In the late 1970's, Mr. Nicosia traveled the United States and Canada, interviewing over 300 people who knew Jack Kerouac. His biography of Kerouac, Memory Babe (Grove Press, 1983), earned the Distinguished Young Writer Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters while still a work-in-progress in 1978. Upon publication, it garnered over 200 reviews worldwide, and has generally been recognized as the definitive book on Kerouac’s life and work. It has been translated into French, Spanish, and Czech, and is currently in print in a revised U.S. edition from the University of California Press.

Nicosia has been a freelance journalist, interviewer, and literary critic for the past 27 years, contributing to hundreds of publications, including the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, the American Book Review, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and the New York Quarterly.

Nicosia has taught creative writing and journalism at the University of Illinois and the University of California, Los Angeles, and he has lectured and conducted workshops at dozens of other colleges and universities, including New York University, Northwestern University, Columbia College in Chicago, the New College of California, Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, and Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He has been a featured speaker at Beat and Kerouac conferences worldwide, including the Naropa Institute’s 25-year-anniversary celebration of On the Road in Boulder, Colorado, in 1982, the Beat Weekend at Plymouth Arts Centre in England, June, 1987, the Rencontre Internationale Jack Kerouac in Quebec City in October,1987, and the dedication of the Kerouac Commemorative in Lowell, Massachusetts, in June, 1988.

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