3.5. Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats
3.5. Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats
Jack Kerouac was an American novelist, writer, poet, and artist.
While enjoying popularity but little critical success during his own lifetime, Kerouac is now considered one of America's most important authors. His spontaneous, confessional prose style inspired many other writers, including Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Hunter S. Thompson, and Bob Dylan.
Kerouac's best known works are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur and Visions of Cody.
He divided most of his adult life between roaming the vast American landscape and living with his mother. Faced with a changing country, Kerouac sought to find his place, eventually rejecting the conservative values of the 1950s. His writing often reflects a desire to break free from society's structures and to find meaning in life.
This search led him to experiment with drugs and to embark on trips around the world. His books are often credited as the catalyst for the 1960s counterculture.
Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to a family of French- Canadians.
Jack didn't start to learn English until the age of six, and at home he and his family spoke French. At an early age, he was profoundly marked by the death of his elder brother Gérard, an event that later prompted him to write the book “Visions of Gerard”.
Kerouac's 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. At Columbia, he wrote several sports articles for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator.
His football scholarship did not pan out and 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, the subjects of many of his novels: the “Beat Generation”, including Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S.Burroughs.
He wrote his first novel, The Town and the City, as well as his most famous work, the seminal On The Road, while living in New York.
The Town and the City 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, it is heavily influenced by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe.
Kerouac wrote constantly but could not find a publisher for 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 (ISBN 0-312-20677-1).
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.
In 2007, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of On The Road, an uncensored version of On The Road will be released by Viking Press, containing text that was removed from the 1957 version because it was deemed too explicit for 1957 readers. It will be drawn solely from the original manuscript.
The book was largely autobiographical, describing Kerouac's road trip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady. Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the post-World War II.
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 San Francisco-area poets, in the book The Dharma Bums, published in 1958.
Kerouac developed a friendship with the Buddhist-Taoist scholar Alan Watts. He also met and had discussions with the famous Japanese Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki.
In 1955 Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, entitled Wake Up, which was unpublished during his lifetime but eventually serialized in Tricycle magazine, 1993-95.
He died on October 21, 1969 at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. His death, at the age of 47, resulted from an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis of the liver, the 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.
