Jack Kerouac

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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.

Early on in his college days Kerouac embraced a bohemian lifestyle that lead him to take drug-fueled cross-country trips. 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. These practices no doubt led to his life-long addiction to drugs. He also rejected traditional ideas about spirituality, and devoted time to studying Buddhism.

Jack Kerouac's books and poems have often been referred to as the catalyst for the 1960 counterculture revolution. Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and others, have publicly testified to Kerouac's influence on them.


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.[1] 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 played sports extensively, liked to take long walks, and wrote little diaries and short stories. He was a sociable child who made friends easily, but 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 that were 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 its formalities. He was a very bright student who skipped the sixth grade. He went to high school in Lowell, Massachusetts, the Horace Mann School for Boys, and then, in 1939 he attended Columbia University in New York. Kerouac was a star athlete who earned a football scholarship from Columbia. By the time he finished high school he knew that he wanted to be a writer so he deliberately skipped classes at Columbia to stay in his room and write. His disenchantment with college increased when he broke his leg at the beginning of the football season during his Freshman year and as he continually had disagreements with his coach about playing time.

When Kerouac left Columbia in 1941 his budding wanderlust led him to join the Merchant Marines in 1942 and and in February 1943 he enlisted in the United States Navy. He was discharged from the Navy while still in boot camp on psychiatric grounds for "indifferent disposition."

He returned to New York after his discharge and sought refuge with his ex-girlfriend Edie Parker. They married in 1944 and while living in a small apartment he met and 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 of his writings. Their influence included experimentation with religious practice, sexual preferences, and drugs.

These men were to become his traveling partners as he roamed the United States. It was the experiences Kerouac had while living and traveling with these men that led him to describe his friends and his generation as the so-called Beat Generation. In a conversation with novelist John Clellon Holmes in 1948, Kerouac commented on his generation by saying "Ah, this is nothing but a beat generation." Holmes wrote an article in The New York Times shortly thereafter entitled, This is the Beat Generation, and the name stuck.

While he was still working on his breakthrough novel "On the Road" his marriage to Edie Parker was annulled and he remarried in 1950, this time to Joan Haverty. Not long after Kerouac finished his manuscript in 1951, Haverty threw him out and filed for divorce, despite being pregnant with Kerouac's daughter.

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. Just three years earlier he had married Stella Sampas, the sister of his childhood friend Sebastian Sampas, who died fighting in Europe during World War II. When Kerouac died he was living with his mother Gabrielle. 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.

Career

Kerouac's first novel was The Town and the City, published in 1950. His father died in Jacks's arms in 1946 and he began writing the book almost immediately after his death. The novel, like all of Kerouac's novels, was autobiographical, and told of the decline of his own family.

The whole family never really recovered from Gerard's death. His mother fell back on her Catholicism to deal with it while his father rejected it. He refused to attend Mass, claiming the Church was no more than a business organization out for a profit. His son's death, and the subsequent failure of his business and then Jack's departure from Columbia left Leo bitter. His relationship with Jack soured as he called him a "bum," and called his friends "dope fiends, crooks and "misfits." His life became chain smoking, drinking, and gambling.

Kerouac's parents had moved from Lowell, Massachusetts to Queens, New York when Kerouac went to Columbia. The novel dealt with Kerouac's mixed feelings about the decline of his parent's small town values and his own increasingly wild lifestyle in the city. It received brief critical acclaim, but Kerouac always thought of it as a failure. It was patterned after the style of his favorite author, Thomas Wolfe. It was not until Kerouac's second novel that he put his own revolutionary stamp on his writings.

In 1951, Jack Kerouac took the ideas from various brief writings and decided to come at those ideas from another direction. He sat down to write and in just three weeks he created what would eventually be his biggest success, On the Road. [2] He didn't sleep, he barely ate, and his main fuel was an amalgam of Benzedrine and coffee. In this manic state Jack taped together long strips of Japanese drawing paper that formed a roll that could be fed continuously through his typewriter. The finished work was one paragraph with no puctuation marks. He said that he was writing the way that Neal Cassady spoke, "in a rush of madness with no mental hesitation."

Kerouac's initial efforts to get it published were rejected because of the odd and unfamiliar writing style, as well as it's favorable portrayal of minority and marginalized social groups. After six years of attempts, Viking Press finally purchased On the Road, but he had to agree to clean up the more explicit passages.[3] .

The year 2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the first publishing of On the Road. To celebrate this milestone, the book is scheduled to be re-released by Viking Press in its original uncensored form, with text taken straight from the original scroll.

On the Road is an autobiographical account of 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.

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 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. 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 drunkenness 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."

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. 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


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

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)

Notes

  1. ↑ Douglas Brinkley, In the (Jack) Kerouac Archive, The Atlantic Monthly, November 1998. Accessed May 29, 2006
  2. ↑ Amburn, Ellis, Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac, St. Martin's Press, 1999. ISBN 0312206771
  3. ↑ Jack Kerouac." American Decades. Gale Research, 1998. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2006. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC

See also

Template:Kerouac

External links

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² Kirouac Family Association bilingual Web Site

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