New York, May 25 (AP) Caleb Carr, the scarred and gifted son of Beat poet Lucien Carr who endured a traumatising childhood and became a bestselling novelist, accomplished military historian and late-life memoirist of his devoted cat, Masha, has died at 68. Carr died of cancer Thursday, according to an announcement from his publisher, Little, Brown and Company. A native of Manhattan, Caleb Carr was born into literary and cultural history.
Lucien Carr, along with Columbia University classmates Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, helped found the Beat movement, an early and prominent force in the post-World War II era for improvisation and non-conformity — on and off the page. Kerouac, Ginsberg and such fellow Beats as William Burroughs and Herbert Huncke were frequent visitors to the Carr apartment, where Caleb Carr remembered gatherings that were enriching, bewildering and, at times, terrifying. “Kerouac was a very nice man.
Allen (Ginsberg) could be a very nice guy,” Carr told Salon in 1997. “But they weren't children people.” Lucien Carr would prove his son's greatest nightmare.
The poet had been imprisoned in the 1940s for manslaughter over the death of onetime friend David Kammerer, who clashed with him and was later found in the Hudson River. Caleb Carr, born more than a decade later to Lucien Carr and Francesca von Hartz, feared he would be the next victim. With a “gleeful” spirit, his father would slap Caleb across the back of his head and regularly knock him.