Non-Fiction; ISBN: 978-0-9997777-3-2; Pages 62; Published July, 2025
Natalie by Robert Dumont
This haunting and lyrical book does not attempt a traditional biography—nor does it fictionalize the life of Natalie Jackson into a seamless narrative. Instead, Natalie is a literary collage, composed of shards and fragments: first-person narratives, archival echoes, journal entries, photographs, and remembered voices.
Natalie Jackson—painter’s model, department store worker, writer, muse to the Beat Generation—emerges not as a single fixed image, but as a figure refracted through many lenses. Robert Dumont gathers and assesses what remains: from Allen Ginsberg’s journals, Jack Kerouac’s novels, police accounts, and Carolyn Cassady’s memoirs, to produce a polyphonic portrait of a woman whose brief, bright, and tragic life intersected with some of the most mythologized figures of the 1950s counterculture.
At once intimate and expansive, this book invites readers into a deeper understanding of a life often reduced to footnotes. Rather than dictate, it evokes—leaving room for resonance, grief, and reflection.
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“Great read, such a heartbreaking story.”
— Peter Hale, Executor of the Allen Ginsberg Literary Estate
“As someone who had not previously known of Natalie Jackson or her story, I was delighted to find this book. It’s both a great introduction and a sideways glance through a window into the world of the Beats—a time and a place and people who ate and drank and wrote and f..... inally did a lot of other things. The collage method employed by the author was the right call to make. There are life-story gaps in everyone’s life and in this case the tragic narrative makes a poignant virtue of them. Our imaginations are thus invited to connect the dots.”
— Ryan Petty, Author of the forthcoming novel Gertrude Alice Frank
“Robert Dumont gives us a dark rhapsody of scholarly connections in this much needed sleuthing out of the mysterious Natalie Jackson. A lost soul barely scribbled between the lines of the Beats, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassady, emerges, flickering. Who was she? Pale ghost of the flaming red hair. We want to know more, and more.”
— Maureen Owen, Author of Everything Turns on a Delicate Measure (Poems)
“Absolutely masterful narrative—the flow, the details, the use of quotations and the presentation of the characters. Robert Dumont’s beautiful Natalie Jackson story brings her back to life and reminds us of the turmoil that existed in Beat San Francisco in the mid-1950s with Natalie at its wild beating heart.”
— Jonah Raskin, Author of Beat Blues
“Natalie is a cool history of a hot mess. Bob takes a Beat tragedy and tells it for today. You know the players, you know the outcome, it’s impossible to look away.”
— Benito Vila, Editor of Charles Plymell’s Of Myth & Men and Keyboard Intercourse
About the Author
Robert Dumont is an Oklahoma native and a graduate of Tulsa University. He is the author of the short story collection: Borough of Churches and a collage-novel: NYC Transit[s]. He is a co-editor (with Astra Beck and Dion Wright) of State Line-Collected Poems and Other Writings by Alan Russo (Rosace Publications). He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.