Jack Kerouac

File:Neal jack.jpg

On the Road cover

Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) or "King of the Beatniks" and "Father of the Hippies" is an American writer, poet, artist, and novelist. He is most famous for his simple, confessional, and meandering writing style that describes his nomadic travel experiences captured throughout his novels, especially On the Road. In a conversation with John Clellon Holmes, Kerouac commented on his generation by saying "Ah, this is nothing but a beat generation," having no intention to give a name and title to his generation, but to actually show that it was devoid of any existing name at all. However, Holmes, a journalist for The New York Times, wrote an article shortly thereafter entitled, "This is the Beat Generation", and the name stuck. Kerouac embraced the bohemian lifestyle early on in his college days, he often rejected common traditions and philosophies, and instead took to the road in drug-fueled trips cross country. He notes in his personal writings and in his novels that he rejected the values of the time and was seeking to break free from societies restraints and embrace something else. These practices no doubt led to his life long addiction to drugs, including alcohol, psilocybin, marijuana, and benzedrine. He also rejected traditional ideas about spiritualism, and devoted time studying Buddhism. Jack Kerouac, although not given the recognition he deserved until after his death in 1969, was a vital influence to many people, including Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan. His books and poems have often been referred to as the catalyst for the 1960 counterculture revolution.

Early Life

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on Marsh 12, 1922 with the given name of Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac. He was the third and final child of Leo-Alcide Kerouac and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque, working-class emigrates from Quebec, Canada. Jack's father ran a print shop and published the Spotlight magazine. His father died of stomach cancer in 1946, but this early exposure to publishing, printing, and the written word piqued Kerouac's already growing interest in the literary world. At the age of four, Kerouac's elder brother, Gérard, was stricken with rheumatic fever and died at the age of nine. The family, and especially Jack, was heartbroken. Jack believed that from that time on Gerard served as his guardian angel, and followed him throughout his life. This belief, along with his memories of his beloved brother, inspired him to write his book Visions of Gerard. Kerouac grew up speaking a dialect of French-Canadian known as joual. He spoke English as a second language and didn't begin learning it until he was almost six years old. Kerouac was an active and energetic child, but also very curious. He played sports extensively, liked to take long walks, and wrote little diaries and short stories. He was eager to please, happy and a sociable child who made friends easily. However, his main companion during his youth and adulthood was the constant notebook he would carry with him wherever he went. He loved to write letters, he always made them long and peppered with details about thoughts he was having, current world situations, and the actions of his daily life. He says his early desires to write were inspired by the radio show "The Shadow" and the writings of Thomas Wolfe, whose style he modeled in his first novel.

Education was an important part of Kerouac's early life, but he soon lost interest in the formalities of it. He was a very intelligent student, skipping the sixth grade, he went onto Lowell, Massachusetts High School, the Horace Mann School for Boys, and then, in 1939 he attended Columbia University in New York. Kerouac was a star athlete during his youth, and his ability to conquer on the field led to a scholarship for football from Columbia. At the end of his high school career he knew that he wanted to be a writer, this was a very conscious and deliberate decision on his part, and thus he often skipped classes at Columbia to stay in his room and write. To add to this, he suffered from a broken leg at the beginning of the football season during his Freshman year. He argued continually with his coach because he was benched during every game, and eventually these two factors led him to leave Columbia for good. He decided that he would much rather travel, write, and lead a peripatetic life, than participate in any formal education.

When Kerouac left Columbia, he sought refuge with Edie Parker, an ex-girlfriend he had stayed in contact with. She lived in a small apartment in New York City that was frequented by various groups of people, many he had met briefly at Columbia. This stint in New York started Kerouac on his path as a traveler and a writer when he formed strong bonds with Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. These three men, more than any other people in Kerouac's life, influenced him, inspired him, and were the subjects of many writings. It was also these men who served as traveling partners with Kerouac during the time when he roamed the United States through hitchhiking, walking, and other itinerant means of transportation. It was the experiences that Kerouac had while living with these men that led him to describe his friends and his generation as the so-called Beat Generation. By this he meant that men were leaving their restricted professions to seek after carefree, non-materialistic, unconventional lives.

Before Jack Kerouac took to the road with Ginsberg, Cassady, and Burroughs, he decided to travel by joining the Merchant Marines in 1942 and followed that up with a year in the United States Navy. However, Kerouac experienced unstable behaviors and attitudes and was discharged during World War II on psychiatric grounds---they claimed that he was apathetic, unmotivated, unpredictable and that he was of an "indifferent disposition."

Career

Kerouac's first novel was The Town and the City, published in 1950. The novel, like all of Kerouac's novels, was autobiographical, and told of the decline of his own family. His parents had moved from Lowell, Massachusetts and to Queens, New York when Kerouac went to Columbia. However, his father's new business failed quickly, and after unsuccessful attempts at gambling, he sank quickly into alcoholism. The novel dealt with Kerouac's mixed feelings of the decline of his parental values and his accelerating wild life in the city. It received brief critical acclaim, but Kerouac always thought of it as a failure. It was most obviously patterned after the style of one of his major influences, Thomas Wolfe. It was not until Kerouac's second and most famous novel, that he put forth his own revolutionary writing style that was characteristic of only himself.

In 1951, Jack Kerouac took the ideas from various brief writings he had been working on like "The Beat Generation" and "Gone On The Road", and decided to come at those ideas from another way. He sat down to write and in just three weeks he created his masterpiece, On the Road. He didn't sleep, he barely ate, and his main fuel was an amalgam of Benzedrine and coffee. He said that he was writing the way that Neal Cassady spoke, in a rush of madness with no mental hesitation. As soon as the book was finished, Kerouac looked in to getting it published, but it was rejected by the various publishers because of the odd and unfamiliar writing style, as well as it's favorable portrayal of the plight of the minority and marginalized social groups of the United States in the 1950s. After six years of attempts, Viking Press finally purchased On the Road, under certain conditions, Kerouac had to take out more of the explicit text he had written. . The year 2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the first publishing of On the Road, to celebrate this milestone, the book will be re-released the way that Kerouac originally wrote it.an uncensored version of On The Road

On the Road is an autobiographical account of Kerouac's roadtrip adventures across 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 main character, Sal Paradise, is modeled after Kerouac and the character of Dean Moriarty was created from the experiences and letters of Neal Cassady. Kerouac's novel is the defining work of the Beat Generation. However, when asked if he was a beatnik, Kerouac replied, "Naw, I'm a Catholic."

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 fact, he wrote many of his novels during the 1950's yet none of them were able to be published. It was only when he and his friends began to get a group of followers in San Francisco that the publishers began to take any notice of Kerouac's writing at all. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder were underground celebrities because of their constant poetry readings. This led to the eventual publication of On the Road as well The Dharma Bums, which many have dubbed the sequel to On the Road. The Dharma Bums details Kerouac's newfound devotion to Buddhism and his traveling adventures with Snyder. In fact, it was Kerouac's friendships that held the inspiration for his writing. His novel Big Sur is based on the time spent with the scholar Alan Watts. Big Sur is considered his last great novel.

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

With the acclaim of On the Road, Jack Kerouac soon became a household celebrity. It was this fame that led to his quick downfall. With the success of his novel, many fans wanted Kerouac to be the man he was in the novel. Thus, although politically conservative and a Catholic who was trying to make a living, Kerouac took to drinking more heavily and began using more and more drugs. The heavy influence of the alcohol age him prematurely and dimmed his writing skill. In fact, after the publication of On the Road there was rarely a day that went by that Kerouac was not drunk. He was uneasy and unhappy. He moved in with his mother and she continued to live with him for the rest of his life. He continued to write after Big Sur, but the writings were sad and slower and showed a very disconnected soul. As his depression and drunkeness worsened, Kerouac became reclusive, staying at home, playing with the same deck of cards, and giving up all of his Buddhist beliefs and replacing them with the devout Catholicism of his mother.

In 1985, John Antonelli's made a documentary called Kerouac, the Movie that shows rare footage of reading from On the Road and "Visions of Cody" from The Tonight Show with Steve Allen in 1957. Kerouac appears intelligent but very shy and reserved, often responding to questions with simple answers that didn't give much away about what the man inside really felt. Steve Allen asked, "Are you nervous?" Kerouac simply says, "Naw."

Jack Kerouac was rushed to St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, on October 20, 1969. He died the following day from an internal hemorrhage that was the result of cirrhosis of the liver. He had been experiencing severe abdominal pain in direct relation to a life of heavy alcoholism and drug use. Hi died on October 21, 1969 at the age of 47. He was living at the time with his mother Gabrielle, with whom he had lived with for the past several years. She seemed to be the only one who offered any sort of comfort in his life after his fame lead to his destruction. He was buried in his home town of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Style

One of the most famous sentences ever penned by Kerouac is "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.." This quote from On the Road demonstrates Kerouac's beat style and his spontaneous prose.

Kerouac's is known for a rare style he began in his simple letters home, but it evolved into what is now known as Spontaneous prose. This literary style is similar to the more well-known stream of consciousness technique. Before Kerouac, no one had ever come close to creating prose like he did. His motto was "First thought=best thought", and thus many of his books, including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans, were written in a matter of weeks, instead of years like his some of his contemporaries. Kerouac claimed that this style was greatly influenced by the exploding Jazz era of his time. More specifically, it was the effect of the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others that gave feeling and mood to much of Kerouac's writings.

Another major influence in Kerouac's unique style was the theology of Buddhist and his personal study sessions with Gary Snyder on the subject. Kerouac's novel, The Dharma Bums is probably the most explicit with his growing and changing views of life as a result of his feelings towards Buddhist. These sessions with Snyder had a profound impact on Kerouac's later life. Just as Burroughs and Cassady traveled and guided Kerouac in his young adulthood, Snyder took on this role in Kerouac's life as he grew older. They traveled together and The Dharma Bums is based off of mountain climbing adventures that Kerouac and Snyder took together. In fact, the main character in the novel is based off of Gary Snyder, his personality, and his ideas. Snyder's influence went beyond Jack Kerouac's writings and into his personal life when he took a job as a fire lookout for several months because Snyder's recommended having that time with nature. Kerouac gives an account of the summer, which was a difficult one for him, in his novel, Desolation Angels.

Kerouac's writing centered around the idea of breath (borrowed from Jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), with this focus he was able to improvise many words over the structures of mind and language, he was so connected to himself and his ideas that he would never go back and edit his work. Connected to this idea also came a disdain for the full stop or period, instead he would much rather use a long dash that he felt gave his writings a sense of connectedness. This prolific use of dashes had an interesting effect on Kerouac's words, especially when read aloud, they sounded as if they were full of a rhythm that was neither conceived or planned. This is where critics began equating Kerouac's words with the lyrics and music of Jazz.

Unlike many writers who liked to keep their methods and ideas secret, Kerouac never tired of talking about his inspiration and his style. Often influenced by drugs and alcohol, Kerouac could talk to anyone for hours about how he wrote and why he wrote. These indiscretions were frowned upon by Ginsberg, who felt that Kerouac's drunken openness would make it more difficult for him to sell his work to a publisher. However, Ginsberg, also a writer, found himself wanting to know more and more about just how Kerouac was able to pen Spontaneous prose the way that he did. Ginsberg read Kerouac's works and wanted to emulate them in a sense, but he was unable to reach Kerouac's talent in that realm. Nevertheless, Jack Kerouac decided to write down his method for anyone who wanted to know how he was able to write like he wrote. The most specific directions he gave on his Spontaneous Prose can be found in the Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, which gives 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

Although Kerouac made a name for himself during his lifetime, he had many critics. Among them were Truman Capote, who described Kerouac's quick writing ability by saying, "That's not writing, it's typewriting." There were other criticisms as well, however, it is beneficial to note that even though Kerouac proclaimed to be a spontaneous writer, there were those who knew him who assert that he did indeed edit. In fact, he wrote and rewrote endlessly, and thus, although his initial draft may have been spontaneous, he did spend days perfecting each piece of writing. This is most likely attributed to the fact that Kerouac was constantly trying to get his work published during the 1950's, thus his revisions can be seen a an attempt to interest the various publishers to whom he submitted his work. Kerouac documented his struggles, his revisions, and his disappointments in collected letters he wrote. It is noteworthy to mention that those letters, and several others, illustrate his Spontaneous prose brilliantly. Those letters, including journals, notebooks, and his manuscripts were sold to the In August 2001, most of his letters, New York Public Library for an undisclosed sum in August 2001. .

Related article: Jack Kerouac in popular culture.

Bibliography

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 Cassady (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 (meditations, koans, poems) ISBN 0-87286-291-7
• Wake Up
• Some of the Dharma
• Beat Generation (a play written in 1957 but not found or published until 2005)[1]
• 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 (1960) (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)
• Door Wide Open (2000) (Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson)

Further reading

• Amburm, Ellis. "Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac". St. Martin's Press, 1999. ISBN 0312206771
• Amram, David. "Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac". Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002.ISBN 1560253622
• 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. "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 Death of Jack Kerouac". ECW Press, 1998.
• Clark, Tom. "Jack Kerouac". Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984.
• Coolidge, Clark. "Now It's Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & the Sounds". Living Batch, 1999.
• Dagier, Patricia; Quéméner, Hervé. "Jack Kerouac: Au Bout de la Route ... La Bretagne". An Here, 1999.
• Edington, Stephen. "Kerouac's Nashua Roots". Transition, 1999.
• Ellis, R.J., "Liar! Liar! Jack Kerouac - Novelist". Greenwich Exchange, 1999.
• French, Warren. "Jack Kerouac". Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.
• Gaffié, Luc. "Jack Kerouac: The New Picaroon". Postillion Press, 1975.
• Giamo, Ben. "Kerouac, The Word and The Way". Southern Illinois U.P., 2000.
• Gifford, Barry. "Kerouac's Town". Creative Arts, 1977.
• Gifford, Barry; Lee, Lawrence. "Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac". St. Martin's Press, 1978. ISBN 01400.52690
• Goldstein, N.W., "Kerouac's On the Road." Explicator 50.1. 1991.
• Hipkiss, Robert A., "Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism". Regents Press, 1976.
• Holmes, John Clellon. "Visitor: Jack Kerouac in Old Saybrook". tuvoti, 1981.
• Holmes, John Clellon. "Gone In October: Last Reflections on Jack Kerouac". Limberlost, 1985.
• Holton, Robert. "On the Road: Kerouac's Ragged American Journey". Twayne, 1999.
• Huebel, Harry Russell. "Jack Kerouac". Boise State U.P., 1979.
• Hunt, Tim. "Kerouac's Crooked Road". Hamden: Archon Books, 1981.
• Jarvis, Charles. "Visions of Kerouac". Ithaca Press, 1973.
• Johnson, Joyce. "Minor Characters: A Young Woman's Coming-Of-Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac". Penguin Books, 1999.
• Johnson, Joyce. "Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958". Viking, 2000.
• Johnson, Ronna C., "You're Putting Me On: Jack Kerouac and the Postmodern Emergence". College Literature. 27.1 2000.
• Jones, James T., "A Map of Mexico City Blues: Jack Kerouac as Poet". Southern Illinois U.P., 1992.
• Jones, James T., "Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend". Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.
• Jones, Jim. "Use My Name: Kerouac's Forgotten Families". ECW Press, 1999.
• Jones, Jim. "Jack Kerouac's Nine Lives". Elbow/Cityful Press, 2001.
• Kealing, Bob. "Kerouac in Florida: Where the Road Ends". Arbiter Press, 2004.
• Kerouac, Joan Havery. "Nobody's Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats". Creative Arts, 2000.
• Maher Jr., Paul. "Kerouac: The Definitive Biography". Lanham: Taylor Trade P, July 2004 ISBN 0878333053
• McNally, Dennis. "Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America". Da Capo Press, 2003. ISBN 0306812223
• Miles, Barry. "Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats". Virgin, 1998.
• Montgomery, John. "Jack Kerouac: A Memoir ...". Giligia Press, 1970.
• Montgomery, John. "Kerouac West Coast". Fels & Firn Press, 1976.
• Montgomery, John. "The Kerouac We Knew". Fels & Firn Press, 1982.
• Montgomery, John. "Kerouac at the Wild Boar". Fels & Firn Press, 1986.
• Mortenson, Erik R., "Beating Time: Configurations of Temporality in Jack Kerouac's On the Road". College Literature 28.3. 2001.
• Motier, Donald. "Gerard: The Influence of Jack Kerouac's Brother on his Life and Writing". Beaulieu Street Press, 1991.
• Nicosia, Gerald. "Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac". Berkely: U of Cal P, 1994. ISBN 0520085698
• Parker, Brad. "Jack Kerouac: An Introduction". Lowell Corporation for the Humanities, 1989.
• Sandison, David. "Jack Kerouac". Hamlyn, 1999.
• Swartz, Omar. "The View From On the Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac". Southern Illinois U.P., 1999.
• Swick, Thomas. "South Florida Sun Sentinel". February 22, 2004. Article: "Jack Kerouac in Orlando".
• Theado, Matt. "Understanding Jack Kerouac". Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2000.
• Turner, Steve. "Angelheaded Hipster: A Life of Jack Kerouac". Viking Books, 1996. ISBN 0670870382
• Weinreich, Regina. "The Spontaneous Prose of Jack Kerouac". Southern Illinois U.P., 1987.

See also

• Beat generation
• Beatnik
• Neal Cassady
• William S. Burroughs
• References in On the Road

Template:Kerouac

External links

² Kirouac Family Association bilingual Web Site

• The Official Web Site of Jack Kerouac
• Kerouac.com - Online Resourse
• Jack Kerouac's Life
• Jack Kerouac
• Jack Kerouac Bibliography
• Books comprising Jack Kerouac's Duluoz legend
• Key to the characters in Jack Kerouac's books, and their real-life counterparts
• Key to the real people represented in Jack Kerouac's books, and their fictional counterparts
• A more complete Jack Kerouac Character Key from the everything2 site
• Blue Neon Alley - Jack Kerouac directory
• Interview with Jack Kerouac (Montreal, 1967) (in French)
• Blyler, Kerouac, and Bohemian Roads- Article linking Kerouac's novel On the Road with D.A. Blyler's Steffi's Club.
• A letter he wrote to Timothy Leary, describing his experience with psilocybin
• American Writers: Jack Kerouac - A two-hour C-SPAN television show about Jack Kerouac
• "A Vision of Kerouac as The Shadow" - a six page comic about two guys in Indiana talking about Kerouac
• "About the Beat Generation", by Jack Kerouac - a definition of the Beat Generation in Kerouac's own words
• Dharma Bummed: A Marxist Analysis of Jack Kerouac and the Beats
• Language Is A Virus Kerouac's 'Belief and Technique for Modern Prose' and 'Essentials of Spontaneous Prose'
• Denver Beat Photo Tour
• Photos of the Kerouac Gas Station in Longmont, CO
• Photos, Neal Cassady Sr. Gravesite
• Photos, Jack Kerouac's Last House, St. Petersburg, FL
• DHARMA beat - A Jack Kerouac website with articles on Kerouac including a Calendar and a Links page
• Jack Kerouac Project website
• Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! festival site
• Independent on Sunday feature
• Analysis of Kerouac's life and works from a Roman Catholic perspective
• A selection of front covers of various editions of On the Road
• Guardian article on the history of the play Beat Generation, written and left unpublished for almost 50 years

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