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Who2 Biography:

Jack Kerouac

, Writer
Jack Kerouac
Source

  • Born: 12 March 1922
  • Birthplace: Lowell, Massachusetts
  • Died: 21 October 1969
  • Best Known As: Beat-era author of On The Road

Name at birth: Jean Louis Kerouac

Jack Kerouac studied briefly at Columbia University in New York (1940-41), where he met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Together they challenged the status quo in the literary world, writing frankly about their personal lives, which were dominated by alcohol and wild times. Kerouac coined the phrase "beat generation" to represent a general feeling among young intellectuals that the American dream had gone sour somewhere along the line. He is most famous for his 1957 novel On The Road, and is the author of the novels Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels.

In 2005 his military record, which includes many biographical details, was posted here, at The Smoking Gun.

 
 
Artist: Jack Kerouac
Born:
Mar 12, 1922

Died:
Oct 21, 1969 in St. Petersburg, Florida

  • Genre: Spoken Word
  • Active: '50s
  • Instrument: Speech/Speaker/Speaking Part

Biography

Jack Kerouac was the major writer of the "Beat" movement in the '50s. His major work was On the Road (1957), an autobiographical novel describing his travels in the company of a unique character named Dean Moriarty (in real life, Neal Cassady). In later novels, Kerouac told other tales of life on the road and also wrote of his childhood and upbringing in Lowell, MA. Although he was a profound influence on the youth of the '60s (and although Cassady, in contrast, enthusiastically joined in on the hippie movement as part of the Merry Pranksters and as a mentor to the Grateful Dead), Kerouac largely disavowed the hedonism and drug use of the '60s counterculture. His poetry and novels continue to influence young people decades after his death. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

Representative Albums:

Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation, The Jack Kerouac Collection, Reads on the Road

Similar Artists:

Minton Sparks, William S. Burroughs, Ishmael Reed, Kenneth Patchen, Ken Nordine, Lord Buckley, Allen Ginsberg

Followers:

Mike Watt, Mark Sandman, Dick Siegel, Tom Waits
 
Biography: Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac

Jean-Louis Lebris de (Jack) Kerouac (1922-1969), American writer, experimented with spontaneous autobiographical fiction chronicling his travels into the American West. He is known as the father of the Beat Generation.

Rambling. Wandering. Overflowing. Like his fiction, Jack Kerouac covered a great deal of territory in a short period of time. Known as the father of the Beat Generation, Kerouac's freewheeling life on the road and his chronicles of that life paved the way for the youth counter-culture of the 1960s.

Born March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac was the son of a French-Canadian printer. Kerouac, who wanted to be a writer from his earliest childhood, did not speak a word of English until he was five years old. He had an older brother, Gerard, who died at age nine, and an older sister Caroline. At age 11 Kerouac began writing adolescent novels and fictionalized newspaper accounts of horse racing, football, and baseball.

A gifted athlete, Kerouac was recruited by Columbia University for the football team. At age 17 he went off to Horace Mann High School in New York to boost his grades and his weight in preparation for Columbia. In 1940 Kerouac arrived at Columbia. In his second game as a freshman Kerouac returned a kick 90 yards, but on his next return he broke his leg. The injury freed him to pursue his true passion - literature.

During this period, Kerouac once bragged, he set a Columbia record for cutting classes. The young writer studied the rolling style of Thomas Wolfe and plunged deep into the New York street scene. In 1941, his leg healed, Kerouac had a falling out with Columbia's football coach. When he left school Jack Kerouac took his first road trip, to Washington, D.C.

Kerouac pumped gas for a while in Connecticut, where his family had moved; worked briefly as a sports reporter for the Lowell Sun when his family returned there; and found himself a scullion on the S. S. DORCHESTER bound for Greenland. Two days after that trip Kerouac was back at Columbia for a second, short stay. In 1943 he joined the Navy, but was honorably discharged as a discipline problem after six months. Kerouac spent the war years working as a merchant seaman and hanging around Columbia with free-thinking Bohemians, including William Burroughs, Lucian Carr, Edie Parker, and Allen Ginsburg. He wrote two novels during the war, The Sea Is My Brother and And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, with Burroughs.

Kerouac married Parker in 1944, but the marriage broke up after two months. His father died in 1946, and in 1947 Kerouac found his guiding light - Neal Cassady.

Cassady's reputation among the New York crowd was of mythical proportions. Mad genius, admired by women, car thief, Cassady visited New York and had Kerouac give him writing lessons. When Cassady returned to Denver, Kerouac followed. After a few weeks in Denver with Cassady, Kerouac wandered into California. During the next four years he travelled throughout the West. When not on the road, he worked on his novel The Town and The City in New York. The novel was published in 1950.

Now married to Joan Haverty, a woman he knew only a few days before proposing, Kerouac began to experiment with a more spontaneous writing style. He wanted to write the way he lived: once and with no editing. In April 1951 Kerouac threaded a huge roll of teletype paper into his typewriter and wrote the single 175,000-word paragraph that was to be On The Road. The more than 100-foot scroll was written in three weeks but took more than seven years to be published.

On The Road chronicles the travels of Dean Moriarity - a Cassady figure - and Sal Paradise - Kerouac as narrator. They travel from New York to Denver, San Francisco, and Mexico City. In it, Sal, the Eastern college square, absorbs the meaning of the West and Kerouac carves out his legacy as a writer and immortalizes the philosophy of the Beat Generation.

On The Road, which despite Kerouac's attempts at spontaneity took shape over a period of three and a half years, was written in at least five different versions. There are three in print. On The Road was the fourth version; Pic, written in 1950 and published after Kerouac's death, was the third; and Visions of Cody, written in 1951-1952, was the final version. The author's changing image of what it means to be on the road can also be applied to his view of what it means to be a writer. In its first version, the road is a specific place. In the second, it is a symbol, and in the final three versions the road is a mix of the imaginative and the real.

The episodic, apparently rambling, prose of On The Road instills its characters with a disdain for established values and a romantic code born out of the West. Sal and Neal are "performing our one noble function of the time, move." And with movement comes wisdom and meaning in a repressive society.

In the time between writing On The Road and its publication Kerouac took numerous exhausting road trips, ended his second marriage, fell into great depression and drug and alcohol addiction, and did his most ambitious experimentation with the narrative form. Always after spontaneity, Kerouac wrote in great bursts of athletic energy - writing complete works through all-night, week-long binges. In 1952 he wrote Visions of Cody, Dr. Sax, and "October in Railroad Earth." In 1953 he completed Maggie Cassidy (a romantic tale of his teenage days), The Subterraneans, and a statement of his writing principles, "The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose." In 1955 Kerouac wrote Mexico City Blues and Tristessa, and in 1956 he wrote Visions of Gerard, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and Old Angel Midnight as well as book one of Desolation Angels.

When On The Road was published, Kerouac became an instant celebrity and spokesman for the Beat Generation. He handled the notoriety poorly. As a spokesman he was contrary and unintelligible. He often appeared drunk, and interviews frequently dissolved into didactic arguments. In 1958 he wrote The Dharma Bums as a commercial followup to On The Road, but then fell silent for four years before writing again. By 1960 Kerouac was a sick and dying alcoholic; he suffered a nervous breakdown.

Again remarried, Kerouac died of a massive abdominal hemorrhage on October 21, 1969, with a pad in his lap and pen in his hand. He was buried in the family plot near Lowell, Massachusetts.

Further Reading

Tom Clark's Jack Kerouac (1984) is an extremely thorough biography of the author's life, but is short on criticism of Kerouac's work. A helpful package is On The Road, Text and Criticism, edited by Scott Donaldson (1979). In addition to the novel, the package includes a number of insightful articles, including pieces by Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, Timothy Hunt, and the transcript of an interview with the author by Ted Berrigan. Lonesome Traveler by Jack Kerouac (1960) is a collection of autobiographical pieces, useful for their style as much as for their content. Jack Kerouac by Harry Russell Huebel (1979) is a quick biography, and Jack's Book, An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee (1978) is also interesting.

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Jack Kerouac

(born March 12, 1922, Lowell, Mass., U.S. — died Oct. 21, 1969, St. Petersburg, Fla.) U.S. poet and novelist. He was born to a French Canadian family and attended Columbia University, where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and others who would become part of the Beat movement, a term Kerouac coined. Kerouac served as a merchant seaman and roamed the U.S. and Mexico before his first book, The Town & the City (1950), was published. On the Road (1957), his best-known novel and the first he wrote in the spontaneous style that he advocated, enjoyed huge success among young readers, for whom Kerouac became a romantic hero. All his works, including The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958), and Desolation Angels (1965), are autobiographical. Alcoholism contributed to his death at age 47.

For more information on Jack Kerouac, visit Britannica.com.

 
US History Companion: Kerouac, Jack

(1922-1969), novelist. Kerouac was an unlikely figure to become a patron saint of the Beat movement of the 1950s, which his novel On the Road made famous, or of the 1960s counterculture, which he eventually came to despise. He was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac to French-Canadian parents in Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town where his father worked as a printer. A shy, introspective child with a deep religious streak, he achieved local fame as a high school athlete, which enabled him to attend Columbia University on a football scholarship.

But Kerouac, who had long wanted to be a writer, was restless. He dropped out of Columbia to become a merchant seaman and then enlisted in the U.S. Navy. When he returned to New York he met Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, whose friends, ranging from Columbia students and jazz musicians to petty thieves, formed the nucleus of the Beat legend that would be exhaustively chronicled by both Kerouac and Ginsberg. The circle was completed when Kerouac met a hypnotic character named Neal Cassady in 1946. Their cross-country travels between 1946 and 1950 became the subject of On the Road, his most accessible and widely read book, and Visions of Cody, his daring, at times unreadable experiment in free-form, spontaneous prose. (It was not published in its entirety until after his death.)

Kerouac's first and most conventional novel, The Town and the City (1950), was heavily indebted to another seemingly formless autobiographical writer, Thomas Wolfe, but it made little impact. On the Road, written in three weeks in 1951 on a single roll of printer's paper, did not find a publisher for six years. During this interval he wrote nearly a dozen books that appeared only after On the Road had caused a sensation.

To the public, Kerouac was associated with the flamboyant characters in On the Road, especially Dean Moriarty, who was based on Cassady. Yet Kerouac (as Sal Paradise) plays a largely passive role in the book: he's the inhibited observer looking for excitement, fascinated by people like Cassady and Ginsberg who seem more self-assured and wildly abandoned. Magnetic to men and women alike, the dexterous Cassady was a con man and sexual virtuoso who was above all intensely alive. Kerouac turned Cassady's complicated life into a dream of irresponsibility, a myth of cool, hip energy and impulsive mobility that sharply rebuked the conservative social values of the 1950s, which stressed home, family, stability, work, and success.

Often confused with his characters, alternately repelled and attracted by the adulation he received, Kerouac was destroyed by his new fame. He lost his fluency as a writer, grew increasingly tied to his domineering mother, suffered a nervous breakdown, which he described in Big Sur (1962), and withdrew into a cocoon of bitterness and alcohol. Pathetically isolated even from his friends, he drank himself to death, adding to the legend he had tried to escape.

Kerouac's messy, self-destructive life was redeemed by his honesty as a writer. Rarely inventing anything, he had remarkable powers of recollection and extraordinary tenderness toward everything he had experienced. His writing begs to be read aloud: the run-on cadences, inspired by jazz, influenced by Cassady's verbal riffs, were written for the ear rather than the page. Eschewing the constraints of formal prose, his kinetic language experiments often achieved an immediacy that helped make works like Ginsberg's "Howl" and Burroughs's Naked Lunch possible.

Bibliography:

Ann Charters, Kerouac: A Biography (1973); Tim Hunt, Kerouac's Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction (1981); John Tytell, Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation (1976).

Author:

Morris Dickstein

See also Literature.


 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Kerouac, Jack
(John Kerouac) (kĕr'əwăk'), 1922–69, American novelist, b. Lowell, Mass., studied at Columbia. One of the leaders of the beat generation, a term he is said to have coined, he was the author of the largely autobiographical novel On the Road (1957), widely considered the testament of the beat movement. Frequently employing idiosyncratically lyrical language, Kerouac's writings reflect a frenetic, restless pursuit of new sensation and experience and a disdain for the conventional measures of economic and social success. Among his other works are the novels The Subterraneans (1958), The Dharma Bums (1958), Big Sur (1962), and Desolation Angels (1965); a volume of poetry, Mexico City Blues (1959); and a volume describing his dreams, Book of Dreams (1961). By the time he died of complications of alcoholism he had written more than 25 books.

Bibliography

See A. Charters, ed., Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940–1956 (1995) and Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1957–1969 (1999); D. Brinkley, ed., Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947–1954 (2004); H. Cunnell, ed., On the Road: The Original Scroll (2007); biographies by A. Charters (1973), B. Gifford and L. Lee (1978, repr. 1994), D. McNally (1980), G. Nicosia (1988), and B. Miles (1998); studies by T. Hunt (1981), R. Weinreich (1986), I. Gewirtz (2007), J. Leland (2007), and P. Maher, Jr. (2007).

 
Works: Works by Jack Kerouac
(1922-1969)

1950The Town and the City. Kerouac's first published novel is an autobiographical depiction of the disintegration and dispersal of a family in Lowell, Massachusetts, modeled on the novels of Thomas Wolfe. Kerouac would later dismiss the work as written by the rules taught him at Columbia University: "But... the novel's dead. Then I broke loose from all that and wrote picaresque narratives. That's what my books are."
1957On the Road. Kerouac's first-person roman à clef, written in 1951 and frequently revised, finally appears, transforming its author into the chief chronicler of the Beat generation. Initially produced by "spontaneous writing" on a roll of teletype, the book is, Kerouac asserts, intended as a jazz composition. It tells the story of the friendship between two men and their cross-country journeys. On the Road becomes a best-selling cult classic.
1958The Dharma Bums. Kerouac's follow-up to On the Road is another quasi-autobiographical quest novel, here derived from the search for Zen Buddhist enlightenment. The main character, Japhy Ryder, is based on Beat poet Gary Snyder. Kerouac also publishes The Subterraneans, a confessional account of a writer's failed relationship with a black woman, written in a three-night, benzedrine-assisted composition marathon. The novels are Kerouac's last popular successes.
1959Doctor Sax and Maggie Cassidy. Kerouac's popularity prompts him to issue works written between 1951 and 1957. The first is a fictionalized treatment of the author's childhood in the character of Jack Duluoz; the second continues Duluoz's story into adolescence. In hopes of establishing himself as a poet, Kerouac also publishes the collection Mexico City Blues, but it is savaged by the critics.
1960Tristessa. Kerouac's novel treats the narrator's relationship with a morphine-addicted Mexican prostitute. Kerouac also publishes Lonesome Traveler, a collection of travel sketches that includes an important autobiographical introduction. It would be followed by Book of Dreams (1961), a series of stream-of-consciousness fantasies.
1962Big Sur. Kerouac reflects on his celebrity as a leader of the Beat generation in a fictional account of his life after the publication of On the Road. He flees to a cabin on the California coast for a more direct, authentic life but is wrecked by alcoholism.
1963Visions of Gerard. Chronologically the first in the autobiographical narrative cycle called "The Legend of Duluoz," which would eventually incorporate all of Kerouac's works, the book describes the writer's childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, and the central trauma of his early life, the death of his older brother.
1965Desolation Angels. The first section of Kerouac's ongoing fictional autobiography treats time spent as a fire lookout on a mountain in Washington; the second half describes his travels in Mexico and Morocco and across the United States.
1966Satori in Paris. Kerouac describes his travels in France to research his lineage as a comic search for various forms of illumination. It is among the best of Kerouac's later work.
1968The Vanity of Duluoz. Kerouac continues his ongoing autobiographical saga with an account of his surrogate's coming of age in the 1930s and 1940s.
1971Pic. The first of Kerouac's posthumously published works is a novel about a black musician traveling from the South to Harlem. Scattered Poems is also published.
1973Visions of Cody. Published posthumously, this revision of the material previously treated in On the Road is a prolonged meditation on Neal Cassady in Kerouac's spontaneous prose style.

 
Quotes By: Jack Kerouac

Quotes:

"All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together."

"All of life is a foreign country."

"I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference!"

"It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on."

"But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!""

 
Wikipedia: Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac circa 1950
Born: March 12 1922(1922--)
Lowell, Massachusetts
Died: October 21 1969 (aged 47)
St. Petersburg, Florida
Occupation: Novelist
Poet
Nationality: United States
Genres: Beat Poets
Literary movement: Beat
Influences: Thomas Wolfe
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Marcel Proust
Jack London
James Joyce
Influenced: Thomas Pynchon
Tom Robbins
Richard Brautigan
Ken Kesey
Jim Morrison
John Lennon
Bob Dylan
Tom Wolfe
Tom Waits
Jerry Garcia
Ben Gibbard
Joe Cutler

Jack Kerouac (pronounced [dʒæk ˈkɛɹəwæk]) (March 12 1922 – October 21 1969) was an American novelist, writer, poet, and artist. Along with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, he is amongst the best known of the writers (and friends) known as the Beat Generation.

Kerouac's work was popular, but received little critical acclaim during his lifetime. Today, he is considered an important and influential writer who inspired others, including Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan, and Ken Kesey, and writers of the New Journalism. Kerouac also influenced musicians such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Morrissey, Simon & Garfunkel, and Jim Morrison.[1] Kerouac's best-known books are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.

Kerouac spent many of the years between 1947 and 1951 on the road, although he often spent extended periods at his mother's home and in the Florida home he purchased for her.

Kerouac's search for a life worth living in the 1950's led him to experiment with drugs and to travel, not only across the North America but throughout the world. His writing is credited as catalyst for the 1960s counterculture which Kerouac himself disdained.

Life

Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, in Lowell, Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents, Leo-Alcide Kerouac and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque, natives of the province of Québec, Canada. Like many other Québécois of their generation, the Lévesques and Kerouacs were part of the Quebec emigration to New England to find employment.

Kerouac did not start to learn English until the age of six[citation needed], and at home, he and his family spoke Quebec French. At an early age, he was profoundly affected by the death (from rheumatic fever, age nine) of his elder brother Gérard, an event later described in his novel Visions of Gerard. Some of Kerouac's poetry was written in French, and in letters written to friend Allen Ginsberg towards the end of his life, he expressed his desire to speak his parents' native tongue again. Recently, it was discovered that Kerouac first started writing On the Road in French, a language in which he also wrote two unpublished novels.[2] The writings are in dialectal Quebec French, and predate by a decade the first novels of Michel Tremblay.

Kerouac's athletic prowess led him to become a 100 meter hurdler on his local high school track team, and his skills as a running back in American football earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame and Columbia University. He entered Columbia University after spending a year at Horace Mann School, where he earned the requisite grades to matriculate to Columbia. Kerouac broke a leg playing football during his freshman season, and he argued constantly with coach Lou Little who kept him benched. While at Columbia, Kerouac wrote several sports articles for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator.

Jack Kerouac lived above this flower shop in Ozone Park.
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Jack Kerouac lived above this flower shop in Ozone Park.
Jerry Yulsman's photograph of Kerouac and Joyce Johnson outside the Kettle of Fish Bar in Greenwich Village during the 1950s.
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Jerry Yulsman's photograph of Kerouac and Joyce Johnson outside the Kettle of Fish Bar in Greenwich Village during the 1950s.

When his football scholarship did not pan out, Kerouac dropped out of Columbia, though he continued to live for a period on New York City's Upper West Side with his girlfriend, Edie Parker. It was during this time that he met the people with whom he was later to journey around the world, the subjects of many of his novels: the so-called Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke and William S. Burroughs. Kerouac joined the United States Merchant Marine in 1942 and in 1943 joined the United States Navy, but was honorably discharged during World War II on psychiatric grounds (he was of "indifferent disposition").[3]

In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as an accessory in the murder of David Kammerer, who'd been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. (William Burroughs was himself a native of St. Louis, and it was through Carr that Kerouac came to know both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.) When Kammerer's obsession with Carr turned violent, Carr stabbed him to death and turned to Kerouac for help. Together, they disposed of evidence. Advised by Burroughs to turn themselves in, Kerouac's father at first refused to pay his bail. Kerouac then agreed to marry Edie Parker if she'd pay it. Their marriage was annulled a year later, and Kerouac and Burroughs briefly collaborated on a novel about the Kammerer murder entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Though the book was never published, an excerpt eventually appeared in Word Virus: A William S. Burroughs Reader. Kerouac also later wrote about the murder in his novel Vanity of Duluoz.

In between sea voyages, Kerouac stayed in New York with friends from Fordham University in The Bronx.[citation needed]. Later, he lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they, too, moved to New York. He wrote his first novel, The Town and the City while living there. His friends jokingly called him "The Wizard of Ozone Park,"[4] a spoof of Thomas Edison's "Wizard of Menlo Park" nickname while simultaneously alluding to the title character of the film The Wizard of Oz.

The Town and the City was published in 1950 under the name "John Kerouac," and, though it earned him a few respectable reviews, the book sold poorly. Heavily influenced by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe, it reflects on the generational epic formula and the contrasts of small town life versus the multi-dimensional, and larger, city. The book was heavily edited by Robert Giroux; some 400 pages were taken out.

For the next six years, Kerouac wrote constantly but could not find a publisher. Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled "The Beat Generation" and "Gone on the Road," Kerouac wrote what is now known as On the Road in April, 1951 (ISBN 0-312-20677-1). The book was largely autobiographical, narrated from the point of view of the character Sal Paradise, describing Kerouac's roadtrip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady, the model for the character of Dean Moriarty.

Part of the Kerouac myth is that, fueled by Benzedrine and coffee, he completed the first version of the novel during a three week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. This session produced the now famous scroll of On the Road. In fact, according to his Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the work in his journals over several years. His technique was heavily influenced by Jazz, especially Bebop, and later, Buddhism, as well as the famous Joan Anderson letter, authored by Neal Cassady.[5]

Publishers rejected it due to its experimental writing style and its sympathetic tone towards minorities and marginalized social groups of the United States in the 1950s. In 1957, Viking Press purchased the novel, demanding major revisions.[6]

In July 1957, Kerouac moved to a small house on Clouser Ave. in the College Park section of Orlando, Florida to await the release of On the Road. A few weeks later, the review appeared in the New York Times proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation. Kerouac was hailed as a major American writer. His friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among others, became a notorious representation of the Beat Generation. His fame would come as an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing. Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the post-World War II Beat Generation and Kerouac came to be called "the king of the beat generation," a term that he never felt comfortable with, and once observed, I'm not a beatnik, I'm a Catholic.[7]

John Antonelli's 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie begins and ends with footage of Kerouac reading from On the Road and "Visions of Cody" from The Tonight Show with Steve Allen in 1957. Kerouac appears intelligent but shy. "Are you nervous?" asks Steve Allen. "Naw", says Kerouac, sweating and fiddling.

In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of Kerouac's immersion into Buddhism. In 1955 Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, entitled Wake Up, which was unpublished during his lifetime but eventually serialised in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993-95.

He chronicled parts of his own experience with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco-area poets, in the book The Dharma Bums, set in California and published in 1958. The Dharma Bums, which some have called the sequel to On the Road, was written in Orlando, Florida during late 1957 through early 1958. Kerouac also wrote and narrated a "Beat" movie entitled Pull My Daisy in 1958.

Kerouac developed something of a friendship with the scholar Alan Watts (cryptically named Arthur Wayne in Kerouac's novel Big Sur, and Alex Aums in Desolation Angels). He also met and had discussions with the famous Japanese Zen Buddhist authority D.T. Suzuki.

Jack Kerouac House, College Park section of Orlando, Florida.
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Jack Kerouac House, College Park section of Orlando, Florida.

Kerouac died on October 21 1969 at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, one day after being rushed with severe abdominal pain from his St. Petersburg home by ambulance. His death, at the age of 47, resulted from an internal hemorrhage (bleeding esophageal varices) caused by cirrhosis of the liver, the result of a lifetime of heavy drinking. At the time of his death, he was living with his third wife Stella, and his mother Gabrielle. Kerouac is buried in his home town of Lowell and was honored posthumously with a Doctor of Letters degree from his hometown's University of Massachusetts - Lowell on June 2, 2007.

In 2007, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publishing,[8] an uncensored version of On the Road will be released by Viking Press, containing text that was removed from the released version because it was deemed too explicit for 1957 audiences. It will be drawn solely from the original scroll[9] and the only things not included will be things that Kerouac himself crossed out.

Career

Kerouac realized he wanted to be a writer before the age of ten; his father was a linotypist and ran a print shop, publishing The Lowell Spotlight.[citation needed] He tended to write constantly, carrying a notebook with him everywhere. Letters to friends and family members tended to be long and rambling, including great detail about his daily life and thoughts.

Prior to becoming a writer, he tried a varied list of careers. He was a sports reporter for The Lowell Sun; a temporary worker in construction and food service; a United States Merchant Marine and he joined the United States Navy twice. Throughout all of this he led a nomadic lifestyle, never having a home of his own.[citation needed] Alternatively, he lived with his mother, stayed with friends or camped out.

Style

Kerouac is generally considered to be the father of the Beat movement, although it must be said that he actively disliked such labels, and, in particular, regarded the subsequent Hippie movement with some disdain. Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of Jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, Kerouac would include ideas he developed in his Buddhist studies, beginning with Gary Snyder. He called this style Spontaneous Prose, a literary technique akin to stream of consciousness.

Kerouac utilized Chögyam Trungpa's "first-thought-best-thought" Buddhist idea,[10] and applied it to spontaneous writing; many of his books exemplified this approach including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. The central features of this writing method were the ideas of breath (borrowed from Jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and not editing a single word (much of his work was edited by Donald Merriam Allen, a major figure in Beat Generation poetry who also edited some of Ginsberg's work as well). Connected with his idea of breath was the elimination of the period, preferring to use a long, connecting dash instead. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words might take on a certain kind of rhythm, though none of it pre-meditated.

Gary Snyder was greatly admired by Kerouac, and many of his ideas influenced Kerouac. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder. One summer, Kerouac took a job as a fire lookout in the North Cascade Mountains in Washington state on Snyder's recommendation. Kerouac described the experience in his novel Desolation Angels.

He would go on for hours to friends and strangers about his method, often drunk, which at first wasn't well received by Allen Ginsberg, though Ginsberg would later be one of its great proponents, and indeed was apparently influenced by Kerouac's free flowing prose method of writing in the composition of his masterpiece "Howl". It was at about the time that Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans that he was approached by Ginsberg and others to formally explicate exactly how he wrote it, how he did Spontaneous Prose. Among the writings he set down specifically about his Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise would be Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty "essentials."

  1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
  2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
  3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
  4. Be in love with your life
  5. Something that you feel will find its own form
  6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
  7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
  8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
  9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
  10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
  11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
  12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
  13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
  14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
  15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
  16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
  17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
  18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
  19. Accept loss forever
  20. Believe in the holy contour of life
  21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
  22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
  23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
  24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
  25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
  26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
  27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
  28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
  29. You're a Genius all the time
  30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..."
from On the Road

Some believed that at times Kerouac's writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose. Truman Capote famously said about Kerouac's work, "That's not writing, it's typing." Despite such criticism, it should be kept in mind that what Kerouac said about writing and how he wrote are sometimes seen to be separate. According to Carolyn Cassady and other people who knew him he rewrote and rewrote. Some claim his own style was in no way spontaneous. However it should be taken into account that throughout most of the '50s, Kerouac was constantly trying to have his work published, and consequently he often revised and re-arranged manuscripts in an often futile attempt to interest publishers, as is clearly documented in his collected letters (which are in themselves wonderful examples of his style). The Subterraneans and Visions of Cody are possibly the best examples of Kerouac's free-flowing spontaneous prose method.

Kerouac in popular culture

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  • The band The Hippos has a song called "Asleep At The Wheel" in which the lyrics state "I've been on the road longer than Jack Kerouac".
  • The band Our Lady Peace song "All For You" contains the line "Jack Kerouac, Kerouac on the road and in my head."
  • The alternative low-rock/jazz trio Morphine has a song called "Kerouac", released on B-Sides and Otherwise. The song sounds like a beat-poetry-style reading with free-form jazz in the background. The lyrics pay tribute to and discuss Jack Kerouac's writing style.
  • The band Rusted Root has a song called "Jack Kerouac" on their Live album.
  • The band Jawbreaker's song, "Boxcar" from the album, "24 Hour Revenge Therapy" has the line, "you don't know what I'm all about - like killing cops and reading Kerouac."
  • Kerouac appeared as the character Gene Pasternak in Go by John Clellon Holmes.
  • Al Stewart, in the lyric for Modern Times, alludes to Kerouac and On The Road.
  • The 10,000 Maniacs 1987 LP In My Tribe contained a song titled "Hey Jack Kerouac"
  • In Steve Earle's album The Hard Way the first song "The Other Kind" mentions Jack Kerouac and being back out the on the road again an obvious influence on his music.
  • The King Crimson album Beat contains the song "Neal and Jack and Me", a tribute to the spirit of On the Road.
  • The alley that separates the City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio Saloon on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood is officially named by the city as Jack Kerouac Alley. The alley is famous for being a meeting ground for many luminaires of the Beat Generation, including Kerouac who often drank at Vesuvio.
  • In a scene from Bob Dylan's 1978 film Renaldo and Clara, Dylan and poet Allen Ginsberg are seen at Kerouac's grave.
  • There is a band called Pretty Girls Make Graves.
  • The band The Thrills released a song entitled "Big Sur."
  • Adam Ant's 1990 album, "Manners & Physique," makes clear reference to Kerouac in the closing track, Anger Inc.
  • Billy Joel's song "We Didn't Start the Fire" mentions Kerouac.
  • The Hold Steady's song, "Stuck Between Stations" opens with the line, "There are nights when I think Sal Paradise was right. / Boys and Girls in America have such a sad time together," a quote from On the Road.
  • The band Weezer has a song called Holiday in which the lyrics state "On the road with Kerouac, sheltered in his Bivouac".
  • Steve Miller Bands Album "Book of Dreams" named after a Kerouac book of same name
  • Name mentioned in the film Across the Universe (film)
  • Name and book On The Road mentioned in the Beastie Boys song 3-Minute Rule
  • The band Bloodhound Gang, on their album "One Fierce Beer Coaster", has a song titled Asleep at the Wheel in which Kerouac is referenced.

Trivia

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  • Kerouac mentions his best friends George Apostolos and Sebastian Sampas, killed during World War II, on numerous occasions throughout his writings.[11]
  • Kerouac's boyhood friends George Apostolos and Sammy Sampas were the uncle and cousin, respectively, of Ted Leonsis, the prominent businessman.[12]
  • At the time of his death in 1969, Kerouac's estate was worth little more than ninety-one dollars, but by 2004 had grown to an estimated $20 million.
  • Kerouac did not learn to drive until 1956 (at age 34) and he never had a driver's license.
  • Kerouac was related to botanist Brother Marie Victorin (born Conrad Kirouac) from his father's side, while his mother was a second cousin of Quebec Premier René Lévesque.
  • Kerouac invented his own fantasy baseball league when he was a child. He continued playing this game well into adulthood.[13]

Influence

Kerouac is considered by some as the "King of the Beats".

Kerouac's plainspeak manner of writing prose, as well as his nearly long-form haiku style of poetry have inspired countless modern neo-beat writers and artists, such as George Condo (Painter), Roger Craton (Poet and Philosopher), and John McNaughton (filmmaker).

The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University is named in his honor. In 2007, Kerouac was awarded a posthumous honorary degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.[14]

Bibliography

Neal Cassady & Jack Kerouac from the cover of On the Road
Enlarge
Neal Cassady & Jack Kerouac from the cover of On the Road

Prose

Poetry, letters, audio recordings and other writings

  • Mexico City Blues (1955)
  • Scattered Poems (1945-1968)
  • Heaven and Other Poems (1957-1962)
  • (1959) (with Albert Saijo and Lew Welch)
  • Pomes All Sizes (compiled 1960)
  • San Francisco Blues (1954)
  • Book of Blues (1954-1961)
  • Book of Haikus
  • (1983) (1000 copies Edited By Arthur and Kit Knight) ISBN 0-934660-06-9
  • The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1956) (meditations, koans, poems) ISBN 0-87286-291-7
  • Wake Up (1955)
  • Some of the Dharma (1954-1955)
  • Beat Generation (a play written in 1957 but not found or published until 2005)[1]
  • (1947-1954)
  • Safe In Heaven Dead (Interview fragments)
  • Conversations with Jack Kerouac (Interviews)
  • Empty Phantoms (Interviews)
  • Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation (1959) (LP)
  • Poetry For The Beat Generation (1959) (LP)
  • Blues And Haikus (1960) (LP)
  • The Jack Kerouac Collection (1990) [Box] (Audio CD Collection of 3 LPs)
  • The Jack Kerouac Romnibus(1995) (a multimedia CD-ROM project coupled with a book) (Ralph Lombreglia and Kate Bernhardt)
  • Reads on the Road (1999) (Audio CD)
  • Doctor Sax & Great World Snake (2003) (Play Adaptation with Audio CD)
  • Door Wide Open (2000) (by Joyce Johnson. Includes letters from Jack Kerouac)

Film

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Hopkins, J: No One Here Gets Out Alive, p. 11. Warner Books, 1980
  2. ^ http://www.ledevoir.com/2007/09/05/155613.html
  3. ^ http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0906052_jack_kerouac_1.html
  4. ^ http://www.wordsareimportant.com/ozonepark.htm
  5. ^ http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Workshop/5083/letter3.html
  6. ^ http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC
  7. ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20050206191742/www.jackkerouac.com/about/quotes.htm
  8. ^ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14045410
  9. ^ http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2005/feb/kerouac/scroll.html
  10. ^ Ginsberg, Allen (2001). Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996. HarperCollins, 366. ISBN 0060930829. 
  11. ^ http://www.uunashua.org/sermons/todiefor.shtml
  12. ^ http://www.cwhonors.org/archives/histories/Leonsis.pdf
  13. ^ http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?archiveDate=08-24-01&storyID=6463
  14. ^ http://www.uml.edu/Media/PressReleases/Commencement_2007.html

Further reading

  • Amburm, Ellis. "Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac". St. Martin's Press, 1999. ISBN 0-312-20677-1
  • Amram, David. "Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac". Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002.ISBN 1-56025-362-2
  • Bartlett, Lee (ed.) "The Beats: Essays in Criticism". London: McFarland, 1981.
  • Beaulieu, Victor-Lévy. "Jack Kerouac: A Chicken Essay". Coach House Press, 1975.
  • Brooks, Ken. "The Jack Kerouac Digest". Agenda, 2001.
  • Cassady, Carolyn. "Neal Cassady Collected Letters, 1944-1967". Penguin, 2004. ISBN 0-14-200217-8
  • Cassady, Carolyn. "Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg". William Morrow, 1990.
  • Challis, Chris. "Quest for Kerouac". Faber & Faber, 1984.
  • Charters, Ann. "Kerouac". San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973.
  • Charters, Ann (ed.) "The Portable Beat Reader". New York: Penguin, 1992.
  • Charters, Ann (ed.) "The Portable Jack Kerouac". New York: Penguin, 1995.
  • Christy, Jim. "The Long Slow D