Edie Parker

Edie Kerouac-Parker (September 20, 1922 – October 29, 1993) was an American writer who was the author of the memoir You'll Be Okay, about her life with her first husband, Jack Kerouac, and the early days of the Beat Generation. While an art student under George Grosz at Barnard College, she and fellow Barnard student and friend Joan Vollmer shared an apartment on 118th Street in New York City which came to be frequented by many of the then unknown Beats, among them Vollmer's eventual husband William S. Burroughs, and fellow Columbia students Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as well as Lucien Carr. Born Frances Edith Parker in Detroit, to Walter Milton Parker, Jr. and Charlotte Frances (née Maire) Parker, and was raised in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan. The 18-year old Edie met Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (aka Jack Kerouac) while an art student at Columbia University. The couple were married on August 22, 1944, at Manhattan Municipal Building in a civil ceremony in downtown New York. At the time, Jack was in jail as an accessory after the fact in Lucien Carr's murder of David Kammerer. This event expedited their intention to marry as Jack's father, Leo, refused to bail him out of jail. Jack was released from jail long enough for him and Edie to be escorted downtown by two NYPD detectives to be married. Once married, Edie could access an inheritance from her grandfather's then-unprobated estate to post Kerouac's bail. The couple left New York on a train in September 1944 to relocate to Michigan, where they would live together briefly in the Grosse Pointe Park home of her mother and younger sister, Charlotte Frances (nee Parker) Pattison. Edie and Jack separated only two months after their wedding, with Jack leaving Michigan in October 1944 to head...