Edie Parker

Who was Edie Parker?

Edie Kerouac-Parker was the first wife of Jack Kerouac, and the author of the memoir You'll Be Okay, about her life with Kerouac and the early days of the Beat Generation. She and Joan Vollmer shared an apartment on 118th Street in New York City, frequented by many Beats, among them Vollmer's eventual husband William S. Burroughs.

Parker was a native of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. She and Kerouac married in 1944. At the time, he was in jail as an accessory after the fact in Lucien Carr's murder of David Kammerer. This event expedited their intention to marry so that Edie could access an inheritance from her grandfather's then unprobated estate to post Kerouac's bail. The marriage was annulled in 1948.

She appears as Judie Smith in Kerouac's novel The Town and the City.