Born in the first half of the 20th century, the writers of the Beat Generation were all young men during World War II and as such they were recipients of draft registration cards.

I was recently researching a few things and came upon these documents, which I had not seen before, and so I decided to share them here. Maybe they will be of interest and hopefully of some use to Beatdom‘s readers.

First up is Jack Kerouac’s draft card. Note that he is called “John Louis Kerouac.” He actually went by an incredible variety of names in his life, as detailed in this short article.

Next we have William S. Burroughs… You can read about his thoughts on WWII here.

Then we come to pacifist Allen Ginsberg, so frequently seen or heard protesting the Vietnam War two decades later.

Lucien Carr was not exactly a Beat writer but he was a big part of Beat history due to his killing of David Kammerer:

Now we come to inspiration for On the Road, Neal Cassady…

Finally, we come to Kenneth Rexroth (whose life was explored in detail for Beatdom #24). He was not a Beat poet but MC’d the 6 Gallery reading of October 1955 and defended the Beat writers publicly after it. Rexroth protested the forced confinement of Japanese Americans during the war and, as a pacifist-anarchist, he was registered as a conscientious objector.

Ok, let’s do one more… This is sort of a bonus and I’m only adding it because it bugs me to see his name wrong in all the books and essays about the Beat Generation. This is the draft card for Peter Duperu (not Du Peru or DuPeru). It looks like Ginsberg got his name wrong a few times and biographers have just stuck with it. Actually, Ginsberg got his name right the first time he ever mentioned him in his journals… but then proceeded to get it wrong after that. DuPeru was a toothless junkie on the San Francisco Beat scene and appears in photos with Natalie Jackson and Neal Cassady. He is in Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, too. Census data, birth records, and the signature below show that his name was not meant to have double capitals or a space in the middle: