NEW YORK — Caleb Carr, the scarred and gifted son of Beat poet 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.
“Caleb lived his writing life valiantly, with works of politics, history and sociology, but most astonishingly for this historian, with wildly entertaining works of fiction,” Carr’s editor, Joshua Kendall, said in a statement.
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.