Although Kandel was born in New York, her family lived in
Bucks County, Pennsylvania during her childhood. Afterward, she moved to
Los Angeles to live with her father, screenwriter
Aben Kandel. Her brother, prolific screenwriter
Stephen Kandel, was best known for co-creating
Harry Mudd, a prominent recurring
Star Trek character. She returned to New York to attend
The New School for Social Research on scholarship for three and a half years before she dropped out. She moved to San Francisco in 1960. She began living in the East-West House co-op, where she met
Jack Kerouac, who later immortalized her as
Romana Swartz, "a big Rumanian monster beauty", in his novel
Big Sur (1962). In the novel, she is described as being the girlfriend of Dave Wain, who was based on
Lew Welch. "Dave" describes how she walked around the "Zen-East House" (
East-West House) wearing only purple panties. Kerouac described her as "intelligent, well read, writes poetry, is a
Zen student, knows everything [...]" (
Big Sur, p. 75). Her first works of poetry were the chapbooks
An Exquisite Navel,
A Passing Dragon, and
A Passing Dragon Seen Again, published in 1959. Several of her poems also appeared in
Beat and Beatific II in 1959. Kandel was briefly notorious as the author of a short book of poetry,
The Love Book. A small pamphlet consisting of four poems,
The Love Book provoked censorship with its three-part poem, "To Fuck with Love." Police seized the work as being in violation of state obscenity codes, from both
City Lights Books and "The Psychedelic Shop" in 1966. Subsequently, Kandel gained cause célèbre status. She herself defended her verse as "holy erotica." A jury declared the book obscene and lacking in any redeeming social value in 1967 and sales increased; Kandel thanked the police by giving one percent of all profits to the Police Retirement Association. Kandel published her only full-length book of poems,
Word Alchemy, in 1967. She was one of 15 people interviewed in
Voices from the Love Generation (
Little, Brown and Company, 1968). In 1976, Kandel recited a poem at the iconic concert
The Last Waltz performed by
The Band (but was not included in the film or soundtrack). In 1970, Kandel suffered massive spinal injuries in a motorcycle crash with her then-husband Billy "Sweet Wiliam" Fritsch (poet,
stevedore, and member of the
Diggers (theater) and
Hells Angels). Despite having to cope with excruciating pain for the remainder of her life, she continued to write and maintain social ties. She died at home on October 18, 2009, of complications from
lung cancer, with which she had been diagnosed several weeks earlier. In 2012,
Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel was published. It features 80 of her poems, many of which had never before been published. == Film and music ==