Jack Kerouac called Moraff "the baby of the Beat generation" because she was just 18 when they met but was already being published by Leroi Jones and in Evergreen Review. She was reading in various New York City coffeehouses when she was able to get out of a very restrictive home environment—complicated by plastic surgery needed to repair her face after a mutilation. In a 1964 interview with Paideuma (University of Maine), Kerouac called Moraff "the best girl poet writing in America". "