Jack Kerouac 1922 - 1969
On the Road
Copyright 2007 Red Pulp Underground

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) - Jean-Luis Lebris de Kerouac

Born: March 12, 1922
Place of Birth: Lowell, Massachusetts
Died: October 21, 1969
Place of Death: St. Petersburg, Florida

Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Kerouac, a French-Canadian child in working-class Lowell,
Massachusetts. Ti Jean spoke a local dialect of French called joual before he learned English. The
youngest of three children, he was heartbroken when his older brother Gerard died of rheumatic
fever at the age of nine.

Ti Jean was an intense and serious child, devoted to Memere (his mother) and constantly forming
important friendships with other boys, as he would continue to do throughout his life. He was driven
to create stories from a young age, inspired first by the mysterious radio show 'The Shadow,' and
later by the fervid novels of Thomas Wolfe, the writer he would model himself after.

Lowell had once thrived as the center of New England's textile industry, but by the time of
Kerouac's birth it had begun to sink into poverty. Kerouac's father, a printer and well-known local
businessman, began to suffer financial difficulties, and started gambling in the hope of restoring
prosperity to the household. Young Jack hoped to save the family himself by winning a football
scholarship to college and entering the insurance business. He was a star back on his high school
team and won some miraculous victories, securing himself a scholarship to Columbia University in
New York. His parents followed him there, settling in Ozone Park, Queens.

Things went wrong at Columbia. Kerouac fought with the football coach, who refused to let him
play. His father lost his business and sank rapidly into alcoholic helplessness, and young Jack,
disillusioned and confused, dropped out of Columbia, bitterly disappointing the father who had so
recently disappointed him. He tried and failed to fit in with the military (World War II had begun)
and ended up sailing with the Merchant Marine. When he wasn't sailing, he was hanging around
New York with a crowd his parents did not approve of: depraved young Columbia students Allen
Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, a strange but brilliant older downtown friend named William S.
Burroughs, and a joyful street cowboy from Denver named Neal Cassady.

Kerouac had already begun writing a novel, stylistically reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe, about the
torments he was suffering as he tried to balance his wild city life with his old-world family values. His
friends loved the manuscript, and Ginsberg asked his Columbia professors to help find a publisher
for it. It would become Kerouac's first and most conventional novel, The Town and the City, 'which
earned him respect and some recognition as a writer, although it did not make him famous.

It would be a long time before he would be published again. He had taken some amazing
cross-country trips with Neal Cassady while working on his novel, and in his attempt to write about
these trips he had begun experimenting with freer forms of writing, partly inspired by the
unpretentious, spontaneous prose he found in Neal Cassady's letters. He decided to write about his
cross-country trips exactly as they had happened, without pausing to edit, fictionalize or even think.
He presented the resulting manuscript to his editor on a single long roll of unbroken paper, but the
editor did not share his enthusiasm and the relationship was broken. Kerouac would suffer seven
years of rejection before 'On The Road' would be published.

He spent the early 1950's writing one unpublished novel after another, carrying them around in a
rucksack as he roamed back and forth across the country. He followed Ginsberg and Cassady to
Berkeley and San Francisco, where he became close friends with the young Zen poet Gary Snyder.
He found enlightenment through the Buddhist religion and tried to follow Snyder's lead in communing
with nature. His excellent novel 'The Dharma Bums' describes a joyous mountain climbing trip he and
Snyder went on in Yosemite in 1955, and captures the tentative, sometimes comic steps he and his
friends were taking towards spiritual realization.]

His fellow starving writers were beginning to attract fame as the 'Beat Generation 'a label Kerouac
had invented years earlier during a conversation with fellow novelist John Clellon Holmes. Ginsberg
and Snyder became underground celebrities in 1955 after the Six Gallery poetry reading in San
Francisco. Since they and many of their friends regularly referred to Kerouac as the most talented
writer among them, publishers began to express interest in the forlorn, unwanted manuscripts he
carried in his rucksack wherever he went. 'On The Road' was finally published in 1957, and when it
became a tremendous popular success Kerouac did not know how to react. Embittered by years of
rejection, he was suddenly expected to snap to and play the part of Young Beat Icon for the public.
He was older and sadder than everyone expected him to be, and probably far more intelligent as
well. Literary critics, objecting to the Beat 'fad,' refused to take Kerouac seriously as a writer and
began to ridicule his work, hurting him tremendously. Certainly the Beat Generation was a fad,
Kerouac knew, but his own writing was not.

His sudden celebrity was probably the worst thing that could have happened to him, because his
moral and spiritual decline in the next few years was shocking. Trying to live up to the wild image
he'd presented in 'On The Road,' he developed a severe drinking habit that dimmed his natural
brightness and aged him prematurely. His Buddhism failed him, or he failed it. He could not resist a
drinking binge, and his friends began viewing him as needy and unstable. He published many books
during these years, but most had been written earlier, during the early 50's when he could not find a
publisher. He kept busy, appearing on TV shows, writing magazine articles and recording three
spoken-word albums, but his momentum as a serious writer had been completely disrupted.

Like Kurt Cobain, another counter-culture celebrity who seemed to be truly (as opposed to
fashionably) miserable, Kerouac expressed his unhappiness nakedly in his art and was not taken
seriously. In 1961 he tried to break his drinking habit and rediscover his writing talents with a solitary
nature retreat in Big Sur. Instead, the vast nature around him creeped him out and he returned to San
Francisco to drink himself into oblivion. He was cracking up, and he laid out the entire chilling
experience in his last great novel, 'Big Sur.'

Defeated and lonesome, he left California to live with his mother in Long Island, and would not stray
from his mother for the rest of his life. He would continue to publish, and remained mentally alert and
aware (though always drunken). But his works after 'Big Sur' displayed a disconnected soul, a
human being sadly lost in his own curmudgeonly illusions.

Despite the 'beatnik' stereotype, Kerouac was a political conservative, especially when under the
influence of his Catholic mother. As the beatniks of the 1950's began to yield their spotlight to the
hippies of the 1960's, Jack took pleasure in standing against everything the hippies stood for. He
supported the Vietnam War and became friendly with William F. Buckley.

Living alone with his mother in Northport, Long Island, Kerouac developed a fascinating set of
habits. He stayed in his house most of the time and carried on a lifelong game of 'baseball' with a
deck of playing cards. His drink of choice was a jug of the kind of cheap, sweet wine, Tokay or
Thunderbird, usually preferred by winos. He became increasingly devoted to Catholicism, but his
unusual Buddhist-tinged brand of Catholicism would hardly have met with the approval of the Pope.

Through his first forty years Kerouac had failed to sustain a long-term romantic relationship with a
woman, though he often fell in love. He'd married twice, to Edie Parker and Joan Haverty, but both
marriages had ended within months. In the mid-1960's he married again, but this time to a
maternalistic and older childhood acquaintance from small-town Lowell, Stella Sampas, who he
hoped would help around the house as his mother entered old age.

He moved back to Lowell with Stella and his mother, and then moved again with them to St.
Petersburg, Florida. His health destroyed by drinking, he died at home in 1969. He was 47 years
old.
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