Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Jack Kerouac was also eighteen, attending Columbia on a football scholarship, impressing his friends with his intelligence and knowledge of literature. Introduced by a mutual friend, Jack and Edie fell in love and quickly moved in together, sharing an apartment with Joan Adams (who would later marry William S. Burroughs). This is the story of their life together in New York, where they began lifetime friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and others. Edie's memoir provides the only female voice from that nascent period, when the leading members of the Beat Generation were first meeting and becoming friends.

In the end, Jack and Edie went their separate ways, keeping in touch only on rare occasions through letters and late-night phone calls. In his last letter to Edie, written a month before his death, Kerouac ended it with the encouraging phrase: "You'll be okay." It was from that note that the title of this book was taken.

"You have a unique viewpoint from which to write about Jack as no one else has or could write. I feel very deeply that this book must be written. And no one else, I repeat, can write it."—William S. Burroughs

Author City: Grosse Pointe, MI USA

Edie Parker (1922-1993) was an author from the Beat Generation and the first wife of Jack Kerouac. She and Joan Vollmer shared an apartment on 118th Street in New York City, frequented by many Beats, among them Vollmer's eventual husband William S. Burroughs. Edie also represented "Judie Smith" in Kerouac's novel, The Town and the City.

Although Edie Parker was only part of the Beat movement for a short time, her role in the community was crucial to the development of the early Beat generation. Not only did Edie introduce Jack Kerouac to the infamous Lucian Carr, which got Jack involved in the Beat movement, but she formed a close relationship with Joan Vollmer Adams, who, like Edie, was no typical housewife.

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