Dipping briefly into his tortured childhood — he was regularly beaten by his father, the journalist and Beat poet muse Lucien Carr, and grew up in hardscrabble bohemian conditions on Manhattan ...

In 1944, Lucien Carr—a 21 year-old Columbia University student and friend of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac—killed David Kammerer with a pocketknife and dumped his body in the Hudson.

Dissatisfied by the orthodox attitudes of the school, Allen finds himself drawn to iconoclastic colleagues like Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Together, this gang would ...