Herbert Huncke (9/1/15 -8/8/96) - Original Beat

Legendary Herbert Huncke was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts,on  January 9, 1915 and raised in Chicago .He  ran  away from home as a teenager after his parents divorced. As a teenager he was drawn to the underbelly of city life, and quickly began learning how to support himself as a small-time thief and began living as a hobo, jumping trains throughout the United States and bonding with other vagrants through shared destitution and common experience. Huncke hitchhiked to New York City in 1939. 

Herbert Huncke is little remembered these days, but he would become  a pivotal figure in the development of beat literature. A charismatic individual he  was considered a muse to other poets and writers of his group, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.A small and unthreatening lawbreaker, he embodied a certain honest-criminal ethic so purely that Burroughs and his friends came to love him for it. 

Huncke's use of the carny term beat in his stories of riding the rails in the thirties inspired Jack Kerouac to chronicle his own tale of rootless wandering in his 1957 classic, On the Road which Kerouac put him in  as Elmo Hassel. He  also shows up as "Junkey" in Kerouac's "The Town and the City" and as "Huck" in his "Visions of Cody" and "Book of Dreams."

He turned William Burroughs on to heroin, and appears as a character in Burroughs Junky, the first step in an immersion in addict culture that would produce Naked Lunch, and the image of Huncke's shoes filled with blood trailing 42nd Street gave Allen Ginsberg the very model of the angel-headed hipster in his seminal poem Howl. 

He worked with Alfred Kinsey in his research studies  and was also known for his roles as hustler, prostitute and drug peddler, who managed to  get to the ripe old age of 81, before dying  on August 8, 1996 of congestive heart failure at Beth Israel Hospital,in a New York City.

 "I always followed the road of least resistance," he said in a 1992 interview. "I just continued to do what I wanted. I didn't weigh or balance things. I started out this way and I never really changed."

I recommend any of his books, if you can get hold of them, seminal and in my opinion the work of genius.They include  'Huncke's Journal' (1965), 'The Evening Sun Turned Crimson' (1980), and a memoir 'Guilty of Everything' (1990)  A  collection of Huncke’s best writings, ‘The Herbert Huncke Reader,’ was published by William Morrow in September 1997,

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http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/herbert-hunckes-birthday.html