Jack Micheline was born Harvey Martin Silver on November 6, 1929, in New York, N.Y., to Herman (a mechanic and postman) and Helen (Michelin) Silver. He changed his name legally in 1963, choosing "Jack" after Jack London and "Micheline" by adding an e to his mother's maiden name.

Micheline's first poem was published in 1954 as he worked a series of odd jobs; a year later, he moved to Greenwich Village and in 1958 his collection River of Red Wine, which boasted an introduction by Jack Kerouac and garnered favorable reviews from critic Dorothy Parker, established him as a writer. Today he is also a painter and painting instructor and has also gained recognition for his primitive-style paintings.

Although relatively unknown to many in the literary world, Micheline is nevertheless regarded as one of the few Beat generation poets who continues to produce important work. Both the style of his writing (his poetry is intended to be read aloud and reflects the rhythms of the spoken word, particularly ethnic dialects, as well as jazz music) and its substance (populated by society's rejects such as destitutes, dreamers and drunks) place him squarely within the Beat milieu, although he himself considered the "Beat Movement" to be an invention of publishers' propaganda. He was also closely associated with many prominent Beat artists, writers and poets, particularly Jack Kerouac with whom he maintained a long-standing friendship (in 1982 Micheline gave a public poetry reading at the Jack Kerouac Conference of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado).

Writers such as Langston Hughes, William Saroyan, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and Miriam Patchen have praised his work, and he is considered an inspiration by many young San Francisco writers. In his essay on Micheline, Gerald Nicosia writes, "[Micheline found] a new conception of the poet as a peripatetic witness, whose job it was to discover beauty beneath the various lies with which men had masked it and to record everything he saw."

(Adapted from "Jack Micheline," Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2005 and from "Jack Micheline" by Gerald Nicosia, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America., The Gale Group, 1983. pp. 410-415. Gale Database)