Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922, Lowell, Massachusetts - October 21, 1969, St. Petersburg, Florida) was an American novelist, writer, poet, artist, and part of the Beat Generation. While enjoying popular but little critical success during his own lifetime, Kerouac is now considered one of America's most important authors. The spontaneous, confessional prose style inspired other writers, including Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan. Kerouac's best known works are On the Road and The Dharma Bums.

He divided most of his adult life between roaming the vast American landscape and living with his mother in her New York City apartment. Faced with a changing country, Kerouac sought to find his place, eventually bringing him to reject the values of the fifties. His writing often reflects a desire to break free from society's mold and to find meaning in life. This search may have led him to experiment with drugs (he used psilocybin, marijuana, and benzedrine, among others), to study spiritual teachings such as Buddhism, and to embark on trips around the world. Ironically, his books are often credited as the catalyst for the 1960s counterculture, even though Kerouac considered himself a political conservative who supported the Vietnam War and disapproved of the hippie movement.

He spent his last years in Northport, New York getting back to his Catholic roots, living alone with his mother and his wife Stella. Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida at the age of forty-seven from an internal hemorrhage thought to have been caused by alcoholism.

Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to a family of French-Americans. His parents, Leo-Alcide Kerouac and Gabrielle-Ange Levesque, were natives of the province of Quebec in Canada. Like many other Quebecois of their generation, the Levesques and Kerouacs were part of the Quebec emigration to New England to find employment. Jack didn't start to learn English until the age of six. At home, he and his family spoke Quebec French. At an early age, he was profoundly marked by the death of his elder brother Gerard, later prompting him to write the book Visions of Gerard.

Later, his athletic prowess led him to become a star on his local football team, and this achievement earned him scholarships to Boston College and Columbia University in New York. He entered Columbia University after spending the scholarship's required year at Horace Mann School. Kerouac broke his leg playing football during his freshman year, and he argued constantly with his coach who kept him benched; his football scholarship did not pan out. After this, he went to live with an old girlfriend, Edie Parker, in New York. It was in New York that Kerouac met the people with whom he was to journey around the world, and the subjects of many of his novels: the so-called Beat Generation, which included people such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs. He joined the Merchant Marine in 1942. In 1943, he joined the United States Navy, but was discharged during World War II on psychiatric grounds---he was of "indifferent disposition."

During Kerouac's time at Columbia University, Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder; this incident formed the basis of a mystery novel the two collaborated on in 1945 entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (the novel was never published, although an excerpt from the manuscript would be included in the Burroughs compilation Word Virus). In between his sea voyages, Kerouac stayed in New York with friends from Fordham University in The Bronx. He started writing his first novel, called The Town and the City. It was published in 1950 under the name "John Kerouac" and earned him some respect as a writer. Unlike Kerouac's later work, which established his Beat style, "The Town and the City" is heavily influenced by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe.

Kerouac wrote constantly but did not publish his next novel for six years. 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. 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. His technique was heavily influenced by Jazz, especially Bebop (and later Buddhism) as well as the famous Joan Anderson letter authored by Neal Cassady. Publishers rejected the book 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.

The book was semi-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. In a way, the story is a retelling of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, though in On the Road the narrator (Sal Paradise) is twice Huck's age and Kerouac's story is set in an America a hundred years after Twain's story. 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."

Kerouac's friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among others, defined a generation. Kerouac also wrote and narrated a "Beat" movie entitled Pull My Daisy in 1958. 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. He chronicled parts of this, 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 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.

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 appears in the New York Times proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation. Kerouac was hailed as a major American writer, and reluctantly as the voice of the Beat Generation. His fame would come as an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing.

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.

In 1955 Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, entitled Wake Up, which was unpublished during his lifetime but eventually serialised in Tricycle magazine, 1993-95. Shortly before his death Kerouac told interviewer Joseph Lelyveld of the New York Times, "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic." After pointing to a painting of Pope Paul VI, Kerouac noted, "You know who painted that? Me."

He died on October 21, 1969 at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, one day after being rushed, in severe abdominal pain, from his St. Petersburg home by ambulance. His death, at the age of 47, resulted from an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis of the liver, the unfortunate result of a life of heavy drinking. He was living at the time with his third wife Stella, and his mother Gabrielle. He is buried in his home town of Lowell.

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. 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 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. Alternatively, he lived with his mother, stayed with friends or camped out.

Style

Kerouac is considered by some as the "King of the Beatniks" as well as the "Father of the Hippies". Kerouac publicly disavowed the Beatniks, who didn't identify with his blue-collar roots, and disliked the Hippies, largely because his politics did not shift to the left in the 1960s and he supported the Vietnam War.

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's motto was "first-thought=best thought", and 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 was the idea 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. 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, with Kerouac coming off as the city slicker. Kerouac took a job as a fire ranger one summer on Snyder's recommendation, but while Snyder was capable of being alone for long periods of time, Kerouac nearly lost his mind in the solitude.

He would go on for hours to friends and strangers about his method, often drunk, which wasn't well received by Ginsberg, who had an acute awareness of the need to sell literature (to publishers) as much as write it, though he'd later be one of its great proponents. 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 your own joy
• 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
• 3. Try never get drunk outside yr [sic] own house
• 4. Be in love with yr [sic] 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 yourself
• 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. Dont 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

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 separate. According to Carolyn Cassady and other people who knew him he rewrote and rewrote. His own style was in no way spontaneous.

A DVD entitled "Kerouac: King of the Beats" features several minutes of his appearance on Firing Line, William F. Buckley's television show, during Kerouac's later years when alcoholism had taken control. He is seen often incoherent and very drunk. Books also continue to be published that were written by Kerouac, many unfinished by him. A book of his haikus and dreams also were published, giving interesting insight into how his mind worked. In August 2001, most of his letters, journals, notebooks and manuscripts were sold to the New York Public Library for an undisclosed sum. Presently, Douglas Brinkley has exclusive access to parts of this archive until 2005. The first collection of edited journals, Wind Blown World, was published in 2004.

Trivia

• Kerouac mentions his best friends George "John" Apostolos and Sebastian "Sammy" Sampas, killed during WWII, numerous times throughout his writings.
• Apostolos and Sampas were the uncle and cousin, respectively, of Ted Leonsis.
• The 1995 collection of Kerouac letters edited by Ann Charters are dedicated to Sebastian -Sammyâ? Sampas, Kerouac-s boyhood friend, who died in World War II.
• Legendarily, On the Road was written in just three weeks, on one continuous roll of teletype paper. (In fact, this is true with qualifications only; see discussion at On the Road.)
• 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.

Influence

Kerouac is considered by some as the "King of the Beatniks" as well as the "Father of the Hippies".

Quotes

• "I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down."

- Jack Kerouac

• "If you're working with words, it's got to be poetry. I grew up with [the books of Jack] Kerouac. If he hadn't wrote On The Road, the Doors would have never existed. Morrison read On The Road down in Florida, and I read it in Chicago. That sense of freedom, spirituality, and intellectuality in On The Road - that's what I wanted in my own work."

- Ray Manzarek, The Doors' keyboard player

• "I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's."

- Bob Dylan

• -Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.â?

- Bob Dylan

• "Once when Kerouac was high on psychedelics with Timothy Leary, he looked out the window and said, 'Walking on water wasn't built in a day.' Our goal was to save the planet and alter human consciousness. That will take a long time, if it happens at all."

- Allen Ginsberg

• "The world that [Kerouac] trembling stepped out into in that decade was a bitter, gray one".

- Michael McClure, San Francisco poet

• Kerouac was "locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle" in "the gray, chill, militaristic silence, [...] the intellective void [...] the spiritual drabness".

- Michael McClure, San Francisco poet

- more

Prose

• Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings (ISBN 0670888222)
• Visions of Gerard (ISBN 0140144528)
• Doctor Sax (ISBN 0802130496)
• The Town and the City (ISBN 0156907909)
• Maggie Cassidy (ISBN 0140179062)
• Vanity of Duluoz (ISBN 0140236392)
• On the Road (ISBN 0140042598)
• Visions of Cody (ISBN 0140179070)
• The Subterraneans (ISBN 0802131867)
• Tristessa (ISBN 0140168117)
• The Dharma Bums (ISBN 0140042520)
• Lonesome Traveler (ISBN 0802130747)
• Desolation Angels (ISBN 1573225053)
• Big Sur (ISBN 0140168125)
• Satori in Paris (ISBN 0394174372, out of print; currently available in ISBN 0802130615)
• Pic (ISBN 0704311224, out of print; currently available in ISBN 0802130615)
• Old Angel Midnight (ISBN 0912516976)
• Book of Dreams (ISBN 0872860272)
• Good Blonde & Others (ISBN 0912516224)
• Orpheus Emerged (ISBN 0743475143)
• Book of Sketches (ISBN 0142002151)
• And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (unpublished work; with William S. Burroughs)

Poetry, letters, audio recordings and other writings

• Mexico City Blues
• Scattered Poems
• Heaven and Other Poems
• Trip Trap: Haiku on the Road from SF to NY (with Albert Saijo and Lew Welch)
• Pomes All Sizes
• San Francisco Blues
• Book of Blues
• Book of Haikus
• The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
• Wake Up
• Some of the Dharma
• The Beat Generation (a play)
• Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956
• Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1957-1969
• Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac
• Safe In Heaven Dead (Interview fragments)
• Conversations with Jack Kerouac (Interviews)
• Empty Phantoms (Interviews)
• Departed Angels: The Lost Paintings
• Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation (1959) (LP)
• Poetry For The Beat Generation (1959) (LP)
• Blues And Haikus (1959) (LP)
• The Jack Kerouac Collection (1990) [Box] (Audio CD Collection of 3 LPs)
• Reads On The Road (1999) (Audio CD)
• Doctor Sax & Great World Snake (2003) (Play Adaptation with Audio CD)