This undated self portrait made available by Little Brown publisher, shows author Caleb Carr and his cat Masha at his home in Cherry Plain, NY. Carr died of cancer Thursday, May 23, 2024, according to his publisher, Little, Brown and Company. (Caleb Carr/Little Brown via AP) AP NEW YORK (AP) — Caleb Carr, the scarred and gifted son of founding Beat Lucien Carr who endured a traumatizing 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 elder Carr had been imprisoned in the 1940s for manslaughter over the death of onetime friend David Kammerer,.