Deep in the soft suburban night came a pounding at the door, another stranger haunted by Jack Kerouac's language and legend, seeking a glimpse of this unlikely place he called home for a while.
"Is this it? Is this it?"
Believe it or not, it was: a tin-roofed bungalow in a pleasantly bland neighborhood here, with a back-porch apartment where Kerouac wrote, brooded and hid out in the months after his influential novel On the Road came out in 1957. The visitor, a Navy man stopping en route to this city's better-known cultural attraction, Disney World, was among dozens who have hunted down the Kerouac home recently, as Orlando has begun promoting it as the city's first literary landmark.
That the King of the Beats, a restless icon of nonconformism, would retreat near the peak of his fame to then-sleepy Central Florida -- with his aging mother, no less -- may be hard to fathom. But Kerouac's sister had moved here, and his mother, Gabrielle, wanted to be near her. A devoted son, Kerouac came along, arriving by bus from New York in December 1956.
Now, in the house at 1418 Clouser Ave. where Kerouac's typewriter clattered late into the night, writers from around the world try to channel his manic energy during three-month residencies. He did, after all, write The Dharma Bums, his follow-up to On the Road, in a two-week fit of inspiration here in 1957, and a poem called Orlanda Blues.
Marty Cummins, who owns one of Orlando's only independent bookstores, thought up the writer-in-residence program in 1997, after The Orlando Sentinel ran an article about the house. It had languished in obscurity for decades and was in sorry condition. Bob Kealing, a local TV reporter, had discovered it after a friend from Kansas City tipped him off to the fact that Kerouac had lived in Orlando. Kealing says the Kerouac biographies do not even mention it.
What kind of literary scene exists in this city hemmed in by big-box retail, resort hotels and theme parks? "It's pretty thin," Cummins said, adding that he had put a restaurant in his shop, Chapters, because nobody was buying the books.
Yet people have been intrigued enough by Orlando's Kerouac connection to help along a nonprofit corporation Cummins created, the Kerouac Project. Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden and Red Lobster, fixtures of the Central Florida landscape, is among the donors who helped save the bungalow from developers.
And while Orlando is not Yaddo, Taos or Key West, a steady stream of writers has applied to live on Clouser Avenue.
Ted May, a Chicago native whose residency at the house ended March 5, used his three months to work on a novel and a blues musical. On his last Sunday night here, he gave a reading at Stardust, a local coffee house, and was surprised by the size and enthusiasm of the crowd.
"A lot of people have asked me if I want to stay," he said. "Everybody is bending over backwards because they really want authentic people here, they really want to make things happen."
Yet May had a hard time persuading friends to visit him here, just as Kerouac did. In a 1961 letter to the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kerouac wrote, "On your trip to Taos and New Orleans, why not come to Orlando also and dig crazy Florida scene of spotlessly clean highways and fantastic supermarkets and Cape Canaveral?" Ferlinghetti declined.
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