(1915–1996)

(Full name Herbert Edwin Huncke) American short story and memoir writer.

While Huncke has received scant attention as a writer, he has been the subject of considerable commentary on his role as a principal catalyst of the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs were inspired by Huncke’s unconventional street life, and this veteran of the urban drug culture served as their guide into a world that had previously been unknown to them. He was first and foremost a hustler, drug addict, and petty criminal, an ethos that Beat writers found irresistibly exotic and, in comparison to middle-class existence during the Eisenhower era, compellingly authentic. Huncke served as the model for characters in several major Beat works, including Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Burroughs’s Junky (1953), and Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956), and it is a commonly-held...