Herbert Edwin Huncke was an American writer and poet, and active participant in a number of emerging cultural, social and aesthetic movements of the 20th century in America.
Background
Herbert Huncke was born on January 9, 1915 in Greenfield, Massachusetts, United States. Herbert Huncke was a street hustler, high school dropout and drug user. He left Chicago as a teenager after his parents divorced and began living as a hobo, jumping trains throughout the United States and bonding with other vagrants through shared destitution and common experience. Although Huncke later came to regret his loss of family ties, in his autobiography, Guilty of Everything, he states that his lengthy jail sentences were a partial result of his lack of family support.
Education
Herbert droped out the school and didn't continue his education.
Career
Huncke hitchhiked to New York City in 1939. In the late 1940s he was invited to Texas to grow marijuana on the Burroughs farm. During the late 1940s, Huncke was recruited to be a subject in Alfred Kinsey's research on the sexual habits of the American male. Huncke had been a writer, unpublished, since his days in Chicago and gravitated toward literary types and musicians. His autobiography, titled Guilty of Everything, was lived in the 1940s and 1960s but published in 1987.
Personality
Huncke claimed that he began experimenting with drugs at the age of twelve. Throughout his life, he was involved in a variety of thefts and spent more than a decade in prison.
Physical Characteristics:
Huncke always was a stylish dresser.
Quotes from others about the person
Huck, whom you'll see on Times Square, somnolent and alert, sad, sweet, dark, holy. Just out of jail. Martyred. Tortured by sidewalks, starved for sex and companionship, open to anything, ready to introduce a new world with a shrug.
A sallow, wrinkled little hustler, hatless and occupying a crumpled sport shirt as though crouched in it to hide his withered body.
Alcohol is not his habit but he'll kindly allow you to buy him a drink at Montero's. His voice is deep, gentle and musical. He never forgets his manners and you'd rarely think of him as Huncke the Junkie. He respects law and obeys none of it.
