Jack Kerouac

Jean Louis Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town on the Merrimack River with a large French Canadian community. His parents, Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac, had emigrated from Quebec, and the family spoke the joual dialect of Canadian French at home. Kerouac later said he did not speak English comfortably until his school years, a fact that shaped his lifelong attention to the sound of language ^[1].

The death of his older brother Gerard in 1926, when Jack was four, marked the household deeply. Gabrielle, a devout Catholic, treated Gerard's memory with near saintly reverence, and Kerouac returned to the loss decades later in his novel Visions of Gerard ^[2]. Catholicism, Lowell's streets, and the working class rhythms of the town supplied material he mined for the rest of his career in books such as Doctor Sax and Maggie Cassidy.

At Lowell High School Kerouac became a standout running back, and his speed on the football field earned him a scholarship offer from Columbia University. He spent a preparatory year at Horace Mann School in New York before entering Columbia in 1940, a move that carried the mill town teenager into the center of American literary life ^[1].

Kerouac's football career at Columbia ended quickly. He broke his leg during his freshman season, quarreled with coach Lou Little over playing time, and eventually dropped out ^[3]. During the Second World War he served briefly in the United States Navy in 1943, receiving an early discharge on psychiatric grounds, and he also shipped out as a merchant seaman, experiences that fed his first published novel ^[1].

New York in the mid 1940s gave him the friendships that defined his work. Around the Columbia campus he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Lucien Carr, and in 1946 he met Neal Cassady, a fast talking car thief and self educated drifter from Denver. Cassady's headlong energy and confessional letters became the model for Dean Moriarty, the magnetic center of On the Road ^[3]. Anyone asking who was Jack Kerouac before fame finds him in these years: an ex athlete taking notes on his friends, working odd jobs, and crossing the country by bus and borrowed car.

His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950 under the name John Kerouac. Written in a conventional style influenced by Thomas Wolfe, it received respectful reviews but sold modestly ^[2]. Dissatisfied, Kerouac began experimenting with a faster, unrevised method he called spontaneous prose. In April 1951 he typed a draft of On the Road in roughly three weeks on a continuous scroll of taped together sheets of paper, so that page changes would not interrupt his momentum ^[4].

On the Road spent six years in publishers' drawers before Viking Press issued it on September 5, 1957. Gilbert Millstein's review in The New York Times called its publication a historic occasion and compared its importance for the postwar generation to that of The Sun Also Rises for the 1920s ^[5]. The novel made Kerouac famous almost overnight and fixed the phrase Beat Generation, which he had coined in conversation in 1948, in the national vocabulary ^[3].

Any account of Jack Kerouac achievements has to reckon with his productivity in the years before and after that breakthrough. Between 1957 and 1962 he published The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, Tristessa, Lonesome Traveler, and Big Sur, most of them drawn from manuscripts he had written earlier in the decade ^[2]. The Dharma Bums, published in 1958, described mountain climbing and Buddhist practice with the poet Gary Snyder, fictionalized as Japhy Ryder, and helped introduce many American readers to Zen ideas ^[6].

Kerouac also wrote poetry, most notably Mexico City Blues, a sequence of 242 choruses composed in 1955 and structured, he said, like a jazz musician's improvised solos ^[2]. He set out his method in a short manifesto, Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, which Ginsberg credited as an influence on the composition of Howl. Kerouac's insistence on first thought spontaneity was partly a public pose, since scholars have shown he revised more than he admitted, but the ideal itself changed how a generation of writers thought about drafting ^[4].

Kerouac married three times. His first marriage, to Edie Parker in 1944, was brief and coincided with his arrest as a material witness after Lucien Carr killed David Kammerer, a case that shadowed the early Beat circle ^[3]. His 1950 marriage to Joan Haverty ended within a year; their daughter, the writer Jan Kerouac, was born in 1952, though Kerouac denied paternity for most of his life and met her only twice ^[1]. In 1966 he married Stella Sampas, the sister of his boyhood friend Sebastian Sampas, who had died in the war.

Through every period of travel he remained tied to his mother, Gabrielle, whom he called Memere. He lived with her for most of his adult life, moving with her among Massachusetts, New York, and Florida, and he wrote many of his books at her kitchen tables ^[2]. Friends often remarked on the contrast between the roaming hero of his novels and the son who kept returning home.

Fame sat badly on him. Kerouac was shy on television, drank heavily to face public appearances, and grew resentful when critics treated him as a spokesman for delinquency rather than as a serious novelist ^[5]. Among the plainer Jack Kerouac facts is that alcohol, not the road, dominated his last decade.

The 1960s brought decline. Big Sur, published in 1962, gave an unsparing account of an alcoholic breakdown at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's California cabin, and it is often judged the strongest of his late books ^[2]. Sales of his new work fell, and he increasingly withdrew from the literary scene he had helped create.

Politically and culturally he moved away from the counterculture that claimed him as an ancestor. A lifelong Catholic and, by the late 1960s, a vocal conservative, he supported William F. Buckley Jr., rejected the hippie movement, and disliked being linked to protest politics. A rambling 1968 appearance on Buckley's television program Firing Line showed him visibly impaired and estranged from his old friends ^[1].

Kerouac spent his final years in St. Petersburg, Florida, with Stella and his mother, who had been disabled by a stroke. On October 21, 1969, he died at St. Anthony's Hospital of an abdominal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis, the result of decades of heavy drinking. He was 47. He was buried in Edson Cemetery in Lowell, where his grave remains a site for readers who make the trip ^[5].

Sales figures alone argue for his endurance. On the Road has never gone out of print and continues to sell tens of thousands of copies a year in the United States, and in 2001 the original 1951 scroll manuscript was purchased at auction by Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay for 2.43 million dollars, then a record price for a literary manuscript ^[4]. The scroll has since toured museums and libraries on several continents.

His influence spread well beyond the page. Bob Dylan credited Kerouac's writing with changing his life, and musicians from the Doors to Tom Waits, along with filmmakers and photographers, drew on his vision of American movement ^[6]. Writers including Thomas Pynchon and Hunter S. Thompson absorbed his rhythms, while later critics have weighed that influence against the books' romanticized treatment of women and of poverty.

Lowell honors its native son with the Jack Kerouac Commemorative, a park of granite columns inscribed with his prose, dedicated in 1988, and an annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac festival ^[1]. Universities now teach his novels as central documents of postwar America, and the fuller archive, opened to scholars through the New York Public Library's acquisition of his papers in 2001, has supported a steady stream of biographies and critical studies ^[7]. Any Jack Kerouac biography written today can draw on journals, letters, and drafts that show a far more deliberate craftsman than the legend of the three week novel suggests.