In one of the stranger annals of private school history, future Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac attended Horace Mann, a prestigious private school in the Bronx, to prep to attend Columbia on a football scholarship. While Kerouac, originally from a French-Canadian family who had moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, cut a preppy figure at Horace Mann, he often escaped from the Bronx campus to hear jazz greats like Count Basie in Harlem. While he would later wash out of Columbia after a football injury and go on to live a bohemian life with other Beat writers for a time, it is clear that Kerouac never forgot his year at Horace Mann. His later novels would refer to Horace Mann as a "an academy of wits." Read more about Jack Kerouac at Horace Mann.
Photo: Jack Kerouac from the Horace Mann Yearbook/Horace Mann
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