A00114 - Jack Kerouac, Beat Generation Author of "On the Road"

 Kerouac, Jack - A00114

"And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it's all in my mind."  (02/09/2022)

"Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all.  It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity.  It is perfect." (12/18/2023)

"On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars -- Something good will come out of all things yet -- And it will be golden and eternal just like that -- There's no need to say another word." (07/13/2023)

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Jack Kerouac
Kerouac by Tom Palumbo, c. 1956
Born	Jean-Louis Kérouac March 12, 1922 Lowell, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	October 21, 1969 (aged 47) St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S.
Occupation	Poet novelist
Alma mater	Columbia University
Period	1942–1969
Literary movement	Beat Franco American
Notable works	On the Road The Dharma Bums Big Sur Desolation Angels
Spouse	Edie Parker ​ ​ (m. 1944; div. 1948)​ Joan Haverty ​ ​ (m. 1950; div. 1951)​ Stella Sampas   ​ (m. 1966)​
Children	Jan Kerouac
Signature

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Jack Kerouac (born March 12, 1922, Lowell, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 21, 1969, St. Petersburg, Florida) was an American novelist, poet, and leader of the Beat movement whose most famous book, On the Road (1957), had broad cultural influence before it was recognized for its literary merits. On the Road captured the spirit of its time as no other work of the 20th century had since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925).

Childhood and early influences

Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town, had a large French Canadian population. While Kerouac’s mother worked in a shoe factory and his father worked as a printer, Kerouac attended a French Canadian school in the morning and continued his studies in English in the afternoon. He spoke joual, a Canadian dialect of French, and so, though he was an American, he viewed his country as if he were a foreigner. Kerouac subsequently went to the Horace Mann School, a preparatory school in New York City, on a gridiron football scholarship. There he met Henri Cru, who helped Kerouac find jobs as a merchant seaman, and Seymour Wyse, who introduced Kerouac to jazz.

In 1940 Kerouac enrolled at Columbia University, where he met two writers who would become lifelong friends: Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Together with Kerouac, they are the seminal figures of the literary movement known as Beat, a term introduced to Kerouac by Herbert Huncke, a Times Square junkie, petty thief, hustler, and writer. It meant “down-and-out” as well as “beatific” and therefore signified the bottom of existence (from a financial and an emotional point of view) as well as the highest, most spiritual high.

Kerouac’s childhood and early adulthood were marked by loss: his brother Gerard died in 1926, at age nine. Kerouac’s boyhood friend Sebastian Sampas died in 1944 and his father, Leo, in 1946. In a deathbed promise to Leo, Kerouac pledged to care for his mother, Gabrielle, affectionately known as Memere. Kerouac was married three times: to Edie Parker (1944); to Joan Haverty (1951), with whom he had a daughter, Jan Michelle; and to Stella Sampas (1966), the sister of Sebastian, who had died at Anzio, Italy, during World War II.

On the Road and other early work

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By the time Kerouac and Burroughs met in 1944, Kerouac had already written a million words. More words came in the wake of Kerouac’s brief detainment in August 1944, when friend and fellow Beat Lucien Carr—who had introduced him to Burroughs and Ginsberg—confessed to having killed David Kammerer, a longtime admirer whose advances had gotten aggressive, in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. Kerouac assisted Carr in disposing of Kammerer’s glasses and the knife used in the killing. When Carr eventually confessed to the police, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness. He was bailed out by Parker’s parents; at that time she was his girlfriend, and her parents insisted that the couple marry before he was released. Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on a novelization of the events, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, soon after. It went unpublished until 2008.

In 1944 Kerouac also wrote a novella, a roman à clef about his childhood in Massachusetts. He left it unfinished, however, and then lost the manuscript, which was eventually sold at auction for nearly $100,000 in 2002, having been discovered years earlier in a Columbia University dorm. It was published, along with some of Kerouac’s notes on the book and some letters to his father, as The Haunted Life, and Other Writings in 2014. That novella was just one expression of Kerouac’s boyhood ambition to write “the great American novel.” His first published novel, The Town & the City (1950), received favourable reviews but was considered derivative of the novels of Thomas Wolfe, whose Time and the River (1935) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) were then popular. In his novel Kerouac articulated the “New Vision,” that “everything was collapsing,” a theme that would dominate his grand design to have all his work taken together as “one vast book”—The Legend of Duluoz.

correspondence from Jack Kerouac to Malcolm Cowley, 1956Note and postcard from Jack Kerouac to Malcolm Cowley, Kerouac's editor at Viking Press, April 1956.

Yet Kerouac was unhappy with the pace of his prose. The music of bebop jazz artists Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker began to drive Kerouac toward his “spontaneous bop prosody,” as Ginsberg later called it, which took shape in the late 1940s through various drafts of his second novel, On the Road. The original manuscript, a scroll written in a three-week blast in 1951, is legendary: composed of approximately 120 feet (37 metres) of paper taped together and fed into a manual typewriter, the scroll allowed Kerouac the fast pace he was hoping to achieve. He also hoped to publish the novel as a scroll so that the reader would not be encumbered by having to turn the pages of a book. Rejected for publication at first, it finally was printed as a book in 1957. In the interim, Kerouac wrote several more “true-life” novels, Doctor Sax (1959), Maggie Cassidy (1959), and Tristessa (1960) among them.

Kerouac found himself a national sensation after On the Road received a rave review from The New York Times critic Gilbert Millstein. While Millstein extolled the literary merits of the book, to the American public the novel represented a departure from tradition. Kerouac, though, was disappointed with having achieved fame for what he considered the wrong reason: little attention went to the excellence of his writing and more to the novel’s radically different characters and its characterization of hipsters and their nonconformist celebration of sex, jazz, and endless movement. The character Dean Moriarty (based on Neal Cassady, another important influence on Kerouac’s style) was an American archetype, embodying “IT,” an intense moment of heightened experience achieved through fast driving, talking, or “blowing” (as a horn player might) or in writing. In On the Road Sal Paradise explains his fascination with others who have “IT,” such as Dean Moriarty and Rollo Greb as well as jazz performers: “The only ones for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.” These are characters for whom the perpetual now is all.

Readers often confused Kerouac with Sal Paradise, the amoral hipster at the centre of his novel. The critic Norman Podhoretz famously wrote that Beat writing was an assault against the intellect and against decency. This misreading dominated negative reactions to On the Road. Kerouac’s rebellion, however, is better understood as a quest for the solidity of home and family, what he considered “the hearthside ideal.” He wanted to achieve in his writing that which he could find neither in the promise of America nor in the empty spirituality of Roman Catholicism; he strived instead for the serenity that he had discovered in his adopted Buddhism. Kerouac felt that the Beat label marginalized him and prevented him from being treated as he wanted to be treated, as a man of letters in the American tradition of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.

Sketching, poetry, and Buddhism

Despite the success of the “spontaneous prose” technique Kerouac used in On the Road, he sought further refinements to his narrative style. Following a suggestion by Ed White, a friend from his Columbia University days, that he sketch “like a painter, but with words,” Kerouac sought visual possibilities in language by combining spontaneous prose with sketching. Visions of Cody (written in 1951–52 and published posthumously in 1972), an in-depth, more poetic variation of On the Road describing a buddy trip and including transcripts of his conversation with Cassady (now fictionalized as Cody), was the most successful realization of the sketching technique.

As he continued to experiment with his prose style, Kerouac also bolstered his standing among the Beat writers as a poet supreme. With his sonnets and odes he ranged across Western poetic traditions. He also experimented with the idioms of blues and jazz in such works as Mexico City Blues (1959), a sequential poem comprising 242 choruses. After he met the poet Gary Snyder in 1955, Kerouac’s poetry, as well as that of Ginsberg and fellow Beats Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, began to show the influence of the haiku, a genre mostly unknown to Americans at that time. (The haiku of Bashō, Buson, Masaoka Shiki, and Issa had not been translated into English until the pioneering work of R.H. Blyth in the late 1940s.) While Ezra Pound had modeled his poem “In a Station of the Metro” (1913) after Japanese haiku, Kerouac, departing from the 17-syllable, 3-line strictures, redefined the form and created an American haiku tradition. In the posthumously published collection Scattered Poems (1971), he proposed that the “Western haiku” simply say a lot in three short lines:

Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.

In his pocket notebooks, Kerouac wrote and rewrote haiku, revising and perfecting them. He also incorporated his haiku into his prose. His mastery of the form is demonstrated in his novel The Dharma Bums (1958).

Kerouac turned to Buddhist study and practice from 1953 to 1956, after his “road” period and in the lull between composing On the Road in 1951 and its publication in 1957. In the fall of 1953 he finished The Subterraneans (it would be published in 1958). Fed up with the world after the failed love affair upon which the book was based, he read Henry David Thoreau and fantasized a life outside civilization. He immersed himself in the study of Zen, and he became acquainted with the writings of American Buddhist popularizer Dwight Goddard, particularly the second edition (1938) of his A Buddhist Bible. Kerouac began his genre-defying Some of the Dharma in 1953 as reader’s notes on A Buddhist Bible, and the work grew into a massive compilation of spiritual material, meditations, prayers, haiku, and musings on the teaching of Buddha. In an attempt to replicate the experience of Han Shan, a reclusive Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty (618–907), Kerouac spent 63 days atop Desolation Peak in Washington state. Kerouac recounted this experience in Desolation Angels (1965) using haiku as bridges (connectives in jazz) between sections of spontaneous prose. In 1956 he wrote a sutra, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. He also began to think of his entire oeuvre as a “Divine Comedy of the Buddha,” thereby combining Eastern and Western traditions.

Later work

By the 1960s Kerouac had finished most of the writing for which he is best known. In 1961 he wrote Big Sur in 10 days while living in the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fellow Beat poet, in California’s Big Sur region. Two years later Kerouac’s account of his brother’s death was published as the spiritual Visions of Gerard. Another important autobiographical book, Vanity of Duluoz (1968), recounts stories of his childhood, his schooling, and the dramatic scandals that defined early Beat legend.

In 1969 Kerouac was broke, and many of his books were out of print. An alcoholic, he was living with his third wife and his mother in St. Petersburg, Florida. He spent his time at the Beaux Arts coffeehouse in nearby Pinellas Park and in local bars, such as the Wild Boar in Tampa. A week after he was beaten by fellow drinkers whom he had antagonized at the Cactus Bar in St. Petersburg, he died of internal hemorrhaging in front of his television while watching The Galloping Gourmet—the ultimate ending for a writer who came to be known as the “martyred king of the Beats.”

Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems (2012) gathered all of his published poetry collections along with poems that appeared in his fiction and elsewhere. The volume also contained six previously unpublished poems.

Legacy of Jack Kerouac

Kerouac’s insistence upon “First thought, best thought” and his refusal to revise was controversial. He felt that revision was a form of literary lying, imposing a form farther away from the truth of the moment, counter to his intentions for his “true-life” novels. For the composition of haiku, however, Kerouac was more exacting. Yet he accomplished the task of revision by rewriting. Hence, there exist several variations of On the Road, the final one being the 1957 version that was a culmination of Kerouac’s own revisions as well as the editing of his publisher. Significantly, Kerouac never saw the final manuscript before publication. Still, many critics found the long sweeping sentences of On the Road ragged and grammatically derelict.

Kerouac explained his quest for pure, unadulterated language—the truth of the heart unobstructed by the lying of revision—in two essays published in the Evergreen Review: “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1958) and “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose” (1959). On the grammatically irreverent sentences, Kerouac extolled a “method” eschewing conventional punctuation in favour of dashes. In “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” he recommended the “vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)”; the dash allowed Kerouac to deal with time differently, making it less prosaic and linear and more poetic. He also described his manner of developing an image, which began with the “jewel center,” from which he wrote in a “semi-trance,” “without consciousness,” his language governed by sound, by the poetic effect of alliteration and assonance, until he reached a plateau. A new “jewel center” would be initiated, stronger than the first, and would spiral out as he riffed (in an analogy with a jazz musician). He saw himself as a horn player blowing one long note, as he told interviewers for The Paris Review. His technique explains the unusual organization of his writing, which is not haphazard or sloppy but systematic in the most-individualized sense. In fact, Kerouac revised On the Road numerous times by recasting his story in book after book of The Legend of Duluoz. His “spontaneity” allowed him to develop his distinct voice.

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Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac^[1] (/ˈkɛru.æk/;^[2] March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet^[3] who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.^[4]

Of French-Canadian ancestry,^[5][6] Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens."^[7] During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes.

Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements.^[8] He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jerry Garcia and the Doors.

In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published.

Biography

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Early life and adolescence

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Jack Kerouac's birthplace, 9 Lupine Road, 2nd floor, West Centralville, Lowell, Massachusetts

Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kéroack (1889–1946) and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque (1895–1973).^[9]

There is some confusion surrounding his name, partly because of variations on the spelling of Kerouac, and because of Kerouac's own statement of his name as Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac. His reason for that statement seems to be linked to an old family legend that the Kerouacs had descended from Baron François Louis Alexandre Lebris de Kerouac. Kerouac's baptism certificate lists his name simply as Jean Louis Kirouac, the most common spelling of the name in Quebec.^[10] Kerouac's roots were indeed in Brittany, and he was descended from a middle-class merchant colonist, Urbain-François Le Bihan, Sieur de Kervoac, whose sons married French Canadians.^[11][12]

Kerouac's father Leo had been born into a family of potato farmers in the village of Saint-Hubert-de-Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec. Jack also had various stories on the etymology of his surname, usually tracing it to Irish, Breton, Cornish, or other Celtic roots. In one interview he claimed it was from the name of the Cornish language (Kernewek), and that the Kerouacs had fled from Cornwall to Brittany.^[13] Another version was that the Kerouacs had come to Cornwall from Ireland before the time of Christ and the name meant "language of the house".^[14] In still another interview he said it was an Irish word for "language of the water" and related to Kerwick.^[15] Kerouac, derived from Kervoach, is the name of a town in Brittany in Lanmeur, near Morlaix.^[11]

His third of several homes growing up in the West Centralville section of Lowell

Jack Kerouac later referred to 34 Beaulieu Street as "sad Beaulieu". The Kerouac family was living there in 1926 when Jack's older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever, aged nine. This deeply affected four-year-old Jack, who later said Gerard followed him in life as a guardian angel. This is the Gerard of Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard. He had one other sibling, an older sister named Caroline. Kerouac was referred to as Ti Jean or little John around the house during his childhood.^[10]

Kerouac spoke French with his family and began learning English at school, around age six; he began speaking it confidently in his late teens.^[16][17] He was a serious child who was devoted to his mother, who played an important role in his life. She was a devout Catholic, who instilled this deep faith into both her sons.^[18] He later said she was the only woman he ever loved.^[19] After Gerard died, his mother sought solace in her faith, while his father abandoned it, wallowing in drinking, gambling, and smoking.^[18]

Some of Kerouac's poetry was written in French, and in letters written to friend Allen Ginsberg towards the end of his life, he expressed a desire to speak his parents' native tongue again. In 2016, a whole volume of previously unpublished works originally written in French by Kerouac was published as La vie est d'hommage.^[20][21]

On May 17, 1928, while six years old, Kerouac made his first Confession.^[22] For penance, he was told to say a rosary, during which he heard God tell him that he had a good soul, that he would suffer in life and die in pain and horror, but would in the end receive salvation.^[22] This experience, along with his dying brother's vision of the Virgin Mary (as the nuns fawned over him, convinced he was a saint), combined with a later study of Buddhism and an ongoing commitment to Christ, solidified the worldview which informed his work.^[22]

Kerouac once told Ted Berrigan, in an interview for The Paris Review, of an incident in the 1940s in which his mother and father were walking together in a Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York. He recalled "a whole bunch of rabbis walking arm in arm ... teedah- teedah – teedah ... and they wouldn't part for this Christian man and his wife, so my father went POOM! and knocked a rabbi right in the gutter."^[23][24] Leo, after the death of his child, also treated a priest with similar contempt, angrily throwing him out of the house despite his invitation from Gabrielle.^[18]

Kerouac was a capable athlete in football and wrestling. Kerouac's skills as running back in football for Lowell High School earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and Columbia University, where he enrolled in 1940.^[25]

From around this time, Kerouac's journal includes an ambitious "Immediate Reading List," a wide-ranging list that includes sacred texts from India and China as well as a note to read "Emerson and Thoreau (again)."^[25]

He spent a year at Horace Mann School, where he befriended Seymour Wyse, an Englishman whom he later featured as a character, under the pseudonym 'Lionel Smart', in several of Kerouac's books. He also cites Wyse as the person who introduced him to the new styles of jazz, including bop.^[26][27] After his year at Horace Mann, Kerouac earned the requisite grades for entry to Columbia. Kerouac broke a leg playing football during his freshman season, and during an abbreviated second year he argued constantly with coach Lou Little, who kept him benched. While at Columbia, Kerouac wrote several sports articles for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, and joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity.^[28][29] He was a resident of Livingston Hall and Hartley Hall, where other Beat Generation figures lived.^[30][31] He also studied at The New School.^[32]

Early adulthood

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Kerouac's Naval Reserve Enlistment photograph, 1943

When his football career at Columbia ended, Kerouac dropped out of the university. He continued to live for a time in New York's Upper West Side with his girlfriend and future first wife, Edie Parker. It was during this time that he first met the Beat Generation figures who shaped his legacy and became characters in many of his novels, such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, Lucien Carr, and William S. Burroughs.^[33][34][35]

During World War II, Kerouac was a United States Merchant Mariner from July to October 1942 and served on the SS Dorchester before its maiden voyage.^[36] A few months later, the SS Dorchester was sunk during a submarine attack while crossing the Atlantic, and several of his former shipmates were lost.^[36] In 1943 he joined the United States Navy Reserves. He served eight days of active duty with the Navy before arriving on the sick list. According to his medical report, Kerouac said he "asked for an aspirin for his headaches and they diagnosed me dementia praecox and sent me here." The medical examiner reported that Kerouac's military adjustment was poor, quoting Kerouac: "I just can't stand it; I like to be by myself." Two days later he was honorably discharged on the psychiatric grounds that he was of "indifferent character" with a diagnosis of "schizoid personality".^[37]

While a Merchant Mariner in 1942, Kerouac wrote his first novel, The Sea Is My Brother. The book was published in 2011, 70 years after it was written and over 40 years after Kerouac's death. Kerouac described the work as being about "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies." He viewed the work as a failure, calling it a "crock as literature" and never actively seeking to publish it.^[38]

In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness in the murder of David Kammerer, who allegedly had been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. William Burroughs was also a native of St. Louis, and it was through Carr that Kerouac came to know both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Carr said Kammerer's homosexual obsession turned aggressive, finally provoking Carr to stab him to death in self-defense.^[39] Carr dumped the body in the Hudson River. Afterwards, Carr sought help from Kerouac. Kerouac disposed of the murder weapon and buried Kammerer's eyeglasses.^[39] Carr, encouraged by Burroughs, turned himself in to the police. Kerouac and Burroughs were later arrested as material witnesses. Kerouac's father refused to pay his bail; Kerouac then agreed to marry Edie Parker if her parents would pay the bail. They married on Tuesday 22 August 1944 in the Municipal Building, with two detectives as witnesses, before Kerouac was returned to his cell in the Bronx City Prison (their marriage was annulled in 1948.)^[33][40][41] Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on a novel about the Kammerer killing entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Though the book was not published during their lifetimes, an excerpt eventually appeared in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (and as noted below, the novel was finally published late 2008). Kerouac also later wrote about the killing in his novel Vanity of Duluoz.

Later, Kerouac lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they had also moved to New York. He wrote his first published novel, The Town and the City, and began On the Road around 1949 when living there.^[42] His friends jokingly called him "The Wizard of Ozone Park", alluding to Thomas Edison's nickname, "the Wizard of Menlo Park", and to the film The Wizard of Oz.^[43]

Early career: 1950–1957

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Jack Kerouac lived with his parents for a time above a corner drug store in Ozone Park (now a flower shop),^[44] while writing some of his earliest work.

The Town and the City was published in 1950 under the name "John Kerouac" and, though it earned him a few respectable reviews, the book sold poorly. Heavily influenced by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe, it reflects on the generational epic formula and the contrasts of small-town life versus the multi-dimensional, and larger life of the city. The book was heavily edited by Robert Giroux, with around 400 pages taken out.

454 West 20th Street

For the next six years, Kerouac continued to write regularly. Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled "The Beat Generation" and "Gone on the Road", he completed what is now known as On the Road in April 1951, while living at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty.^[45] The book was largely autobiographical and describes Kerouac's road-trip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady in the late 40s and early 50s, as well as his relationships with other Beat writers and friends. Although some of the novel is focused on driving, Kerouac did not have a driver's license and Cassady did most of the cross-country driving. He learned to drive aged 34, but never had a formal license.^[46]

Kerouac completed the first version of the novel during a three-week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. Kerouac wrote the final draft in 20 days, with Joan, his wife, supplying him with benzedrine, cigarettes, bowls of pea soup, and mugs of coffee to keep him going.^[47] Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paper^[48] into long strips, wide enough for a typewriter, and taped them together into a 120-foot (37 m) long roll which he then fed into the machine. This allowed him to type continuously without the interruption of reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or paragraph breaks and was much more explicit than the version which was eventually published. Though "spontaneous," Kerouac had prepared long in advance before beginning to write.^[49] In fact, according to his Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the work in his journals over the several preceding years.

Though the work was completed quickly, Kerouac had a long and difficult time finding a publisher. Before On the Road was accepted by Viking Press, Kerouac got a job as a "railroad brakeman and fire lookout" (see Desolation Peak (Washington)) traveling between the East and West coasts of the United States to earn money, frequently finding rest and the quiet space necessary for writing at the home of his mother. While employed in this way he met and befriended Abe Green, a young freight train jumper who later introduced Kerouac to Herbert Huncke, a Times Square street hustler and favorite of many Beat Generation writers.

According to Kerouac, On the Road "was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever Established and really must not be spoken about."^[18] According to his biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley, On the Road has been misinterpreted as a tale of companions out looking for kicks, but the most important thing to comprehend is that Kerouac was an American Catholic author – for example, virtually every page of his diary bore a sketch of a crucifix, a prayer, or an appeal to Christ to be forgiven.^[50]

In the spring of 1951, while pregnant, Joan Haverty left and divorced Kerouac.^[51] In February 1952, she gave birth to Kerouac's only child, Jan Kerouac, whom he acknowledged as his daughter after a blood test confirmed it nine years later.^[52] For the next several years Kerouac continued writing and traveling, taking long trips through the U.S. and Mexico. He often experienced episodes of heavy drinking and depression. During this period, he finished drafts of what became ten more novels, including The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Tristessa, and Desolation Angels, which chronicle many of the events of these years.

In 1953, he lived mostly in New York City, having a brief but passionate affair with Alene Lee, an African-American woman, and member of the Beat generation. Alene was the basis for the character named "Mardou" in the novel The Subterraneans, and Irene May in Book of Dreams and Big Sur. At the request of his editors, Kerouac changed the setting of the novel from New York to San Francisco.^[53]

In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of his study of Buddhism. Between 1955 and 1956, he lived on and off with his sister, whom he called "Nin," and her husband, Paul Blake, at their home outside of Rocky Mount, North Carolina ("Testament, Va." in his works) where he meditated on, and studied, Buddhism.^[54] He wrote Some of the Dharma, an imaginative treatise on Buddhism, while living there.^[55][56] However, Kerouac had earlier taken an interest in Eastern thought. In 1946 he read Heinrich Zimmer's Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. In 1955, Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, titled Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, which was unpublished during his lifetime, but eventually serialized in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993–95. It was published by Viking in September 2008.^[57]

House in College Park in Orlando, Florida, where Kerouac lived and wrote The Dharma Bums

Kerouac found enemies on both sides of the political spectrum, the right disdaining his association with drugs and sexual libertinism and the left contemptuous of his anti-communism and Catholicism; characteristically, he watched the 1954 Senate McCarthy hearings smoking marijuana and rooting for the anti-communist crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy.^[18] In Desolation Angels he wrote, "when I went to Columbia all they tried to teach us was Marx, as if I cared" (considering Marxism, like Freudianism, to be an illusory tangent).^[58]

In 1957, after being rejected by several other publishers, On the Road was finally purchased by Viking Press, which demanded major revisions prior to publication.^[49] Many of the most sexually explicit passages were removed and, fearing libel suits, pseudonyms were used for the book's "characters." These revisions have often led to criticisms of the alleged spontaneity of Kerouac's style.^[48]

Later career: 1957–1969

[edit]

In July 1957, Kerouac moved to a small house at 1418½ Clouser Avenue in the College Park section of Orlando, Florida, to await the release of On the Road. Weeks later, a review of the book by Gilbert Millstein appeared in The New York Times proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation.^[59] Kerouac was hailed as a major American writer. His friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among others, became a notorious representation of the Beat Generation. The term Beat Generation was invented by Kerouac during a conversation held with fellow novelist Herbert Huncke. Huncke used the term "beat" to describe a person with little money and few prospects.^[60] Kerouac's fame came as an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing.

Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the post-World War II Beat Generation and Kerouac came to be called "the king of the beat generation,"^[61] a term with which he never felt comfortable. He once observed, "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic", showing the reporter a painting of Pope Paul VI and saying, "You know who painted that? Me."^[62]

The success of On the Road brought Kerouac instant fame. His celebrity status brought publishers desiring unwanted manuscripts that were previously rejected before its publication.^[19] After nine months, he no longer felt safe in public. He was badly beaten by three men outside the San Remo Cafe at 189 Bleecker Street in New York City one night. Neal Cassady, possibly as a result of his new notoriety as the central character of the book, was set up and arrested for selling marijuana.^[63][64]

In response, Kerouac chronicled parts of his own experience with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco–area poets, in The Dharma Bums, set in California and Washington and published in 1958. It was written in Orlando between November 26^[65] and December 7, 1957.^[66] To begin writing Dharma Bums, Kerouac typed onto a ten-foot length of teleprinter paper, to avoid interrupting his flow for paper changes, as he had done six years previously for On the Road.^[65]

Kerouac was demoralized by criticism of Dharma Bums from such respected figures in the American field of Buddhism as Zen teachers Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Alan Watts. He wrote to Snyder, referring to a meeting with D. T. Suzuki, that "even Suzuki was looking at me through slitted eyes as though I was a monstrous imposter." He passed up the opportunity to reunite with Snyder in California, and explained to Philip Whalen "I'd be ashamed to confront you and Gary now I've become so decadent and drunk and don't give a shit. I'm not a Buddhist any more."^[67] In further reaction to their criticism, he quoted part of Abe Green's café recitation, Thrasonical Yawning in the Abattoir of the Soul: "A gaping, rabid congregation, eager to bathe, are washed over by the Font of Euphoria, and bask like protozoans in the celebrated light."

Kerouac used earnings from On the Road to purchase the first of three homes in Northport, New York — a wood-framed Victorian on Gilbert Street that he shared with his mother, Gabrielle. They moved there in March 1958 and stayed in Northport for six years, moving twice during that time.

Kerouac also wrote and narrated a beat movie titled Pull My Daisy (1959), directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. It starred poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, musician David Amram and painter Larry Rivers among others.^[68] Originally to be called The Beat Generation, the title was changed at the last moment when MGM released a film by the same name in July 1959 that sensationalized beatnik culture.

The television series Route 66 (1960–1964), featuring two untethered young men "on the road" in a Corvette seeking adventure and fueling their travels by apparently plentiful temporary jobs in the various U.S. locales framing the anthology-styled stories, gave the impression of being a commercially sanitized misappropriation of Kerouac's story model for On the Road.^[69] Even the leads, Buz and Todd, bore a resemblance to the dark, athletic Kerouac and the blonde Cassady/Moriarty, respectively. Kerouac felt he'd been conspicuously ripped off by Route 66 creator Stirling Silliphant and sought to sue him, CBS, the Screen Gems TV production company, and sponsor Chevrolet, but was somehow counseled against proceeding with what looked like a very potent cause of action.^[69]

John Antonelli's 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie begins and ends with footage of Kerouac reading from On the Road and Visions of Cody on The Steve Allen Show in November 1959. In response to Allen's question "How would you define the word 'beat?'", Kerouac responds "well ... sympathetic."^[70]

In 1965, he met the poet Youenn Gwernig who was a Breton American like him in New York, and they became friends. Gwernig used to translate his Breton language poems into English so that Kerouac could read and understand them : "Meeting with Jack Kerouac in 1965, for instance, was a decisive turn. Since he could not speak Breton he asked me: 'Would you not write some of your poems in English? I'd really like to read them ! ... ' So I wrote an Diri Dir – Stairs of Steel for him, and kept on doing so. That's why I often write my poems in Breton, French and English."^[71]

During these years, Kerouac suffered the loss of his older sister to a heart attack in 1964 and his mother suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1966. Kerouac moved in with his mother in Hyannis, Massachusetts, for almost a year in 1966.^[72] In 1968, Neal Cassady also died while in Mexico.^[73]

Despite the role which his literary work played in inspiring the counterculture movement of the 1960s, Kerouac was openly critical of it.^[74] Arguments over the movement, which Kerouac believed was only an excuse to be "spiteful," also resulted in him splitting with Ginsberg by 1968.^[75]

Also in 1968, Kerouac last appeared on television, for Firing Line, produced and hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. (a friend of his from college). Seemingly intoxicated, he affirmed his Catholicism and talked about the counterculture of the 1960s.^[74]

Death

[edit]

On the morning of October 20, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kerouac was working on a book about his father's print shop. He suddenly felt nauseated and went to the bathroom, where he began to vomit blood. Kerouac was taken to St. Anthony's Hospital, suffering from an esophageal hemorrhage. He received several transfusions in an attempt to make up for the loss of blood, and doctors subsequently attempted surgery, but a damaged liver prevented his blood from clotting. He never regained consciousness after the operation, and died at the hospital at 5:15 the following morning, at the age of 47. His cause of death was listed as an internal hemorrhage (bleeding esophageal varices) caused by cirrhosis, the result of longtime alcohol abuse.^[76][77] A possible contributing factor was an untreated hernia he suffered in a bar fight several weeks earlier.^[78][79][80] His funeral was held at St. Jean Baptiste Church in Lowell, Massachusetts, and he was buried at Edson Cemetery.^[81]

Grave in Edson Cemetery, Lowell

At the time of his death, Kerouac was living with his third wife, Stella Sampas Kerouac. His mother, Gabrielle, inherited most of his estate.^[82]

Style

[edit]

Kerouac is generally considered to be the father of the Beat movement, although he actively disliked such labels. Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of jazz, especially the bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, he included ideas he developed from his Buddhist studies that began with Gary Snyder. He often referred to his style as "spontaneous prose".^[83] Although Kerouac's prose was spontaneous and purportedly without edits, he primarily wrote autobiographical novels (or roman à clef) based upon actual events from his life and the people with whom he interacted. This approach is reflected also by his plot structure: his narratives were not heavily focused on traditional plot structures. Instead, his works often revolved around a series of episodic encounters, road trips, and personal reflections. The emphasis was on the characters' experiences and the exploration of themes such as freedom, rebellion, and the search for meaning.

On the Road excerpt in the center of Jack Kerouac Alley

Many of his books exemplified this spontaneous approach, including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. The central features of this writing method were the ideas of breath (borrowed from jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and limited revision. Connected with this idea of breath was the elimination of the period, substituting instead a long connecting dash. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words take on a certain musical rhythm and tempo.^{[citation needed]}

Kerouac greatly admired and was influenced by Gary Snyder. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder, and includes excerpts of letters from Snyder.^[84] While living with Snyder outside Mill Valley, California, in 1956, Kerouac worked on a book about him, which he considered calling Visions of Gary.^[85] (This eventually became Dharma Bums, which Kerouac described as "mostly about [Snyder].")^[86] That summer, Kerouac took a job as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in Washington, after hearing Snyder's and Whalen's stories of working as fire spotters. Kerouac described the experience in Desolation Angels and later in "Alone on a Mountaintop" (published in Lonesome Traveler) and The Dharma Bums.^[87][88][89]

Kerouac would go on for hours, often drunk, to friends and strangers about his method. Allen Ginsberg, initially unimpressed, would later be one of his great proponents, and it was Kerouac's free-flowing prose method that inspired the composition of Ginsberg's poem Howl. It was at about the time of The Subterraneans that he was encouraged by Ginsberg and others to formally explain his style. Of his expositions of the spontaneous prose method, the most concise was "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose", a list of 30 "essential" maxims.^{[citation needed]}

... and I shambled after as usual as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because 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 and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

—On the Road

Some believed that at times Kerouac's writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose. Truman Capote said of it, "That's not writing, it's typing".^[90] According to Carolyn Cassady and others, he constantly rewrote and revised his work.^[91]

Although the body of Kerouac's work has been published in English, in addition to his poetry and letters to friends and family, he also wrote unpublished works of fiction in French. The existence of his two novels written in French, La nuit est ma femme and Sur le chemin was revealed to the general public in a series of articles published by journalist Gabriel Anctil, in the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir in 2007 and 2008.^[92][93][94] All these works, including La nuit est ma femme, Sur le chemin, and large sections of Maggie Cassidy (originally written in French), have now been published together in a volume entitled La vie est d'hommage (Boréal, 2016) edited by University of Pennsylvania professor Jean-Christophe Cloutier. In 1996, the Nouvelle Revue Française had already published excerpts and an article on "La nuit est ma femme", and scholar Paul Maher Jr., in his biography Kerouac: His Life and Work', discussed Sur le chemin. The novella, completed in five days in Mexico during December 1952, is a telling example of Kerouac's attempts at writing in his first language, a language he often called Canuck French.

Kerouac refers to this short novel in a letter addressed to Neal Cassady (who is commonly known as the inspiration for the character Dean Moriarty) dated January 10, 1953. The published novel runs over 110 pages, having been reconstituted from six distinct files in the Kerouac archive by Professor Cloutier. Set in 1935, mostly on the East Coast, it explores some of the recurring themes of Kerouac's literature by way of a spoken word narrative. Here, as with most of his French writings, Kerouac writes with little regard for grammar or spelling, often relying on phonetics in order to render an authentic reproduction of the French-Canadian vernacular. Even though this work has the same title as one of his best known English novels, it is the original French version of an incomplete translation that later became Old Bull in the Bowery (now published in The Unknown Kerouac from the Library of America).^[95] The Unknown Kerouac, edited by Todd Tietchen, includes Cloutier's translation of La nuit est ma femme and the completed translation of Sur le Chemin under the title Old Bull in the Bowery. La nuit est ma femme was written in early 1951 and completed a few days or weeks before he began the original English version of On the Road, as many scholars, such as Paul Maher Jr., Joyce Johnson, Hassan Melehy, and Gabriel Anctil^[96][97][98] have pointed out.

Influences

[edit]

Kerouac's early writing, particularly his first novel The Town and the City, was more conventional, and bore the strong influence of Thomas Wolfe. The technique Kerouac developed that later gained him notoriety was heavily influenced by jazz, especially Bebop, and later, Buddhism, as well as the Joan Anderson letter written by Neal Cassady.^[99] The Diamond Sutra was the most important Buddhist text for Kerouac, and "probably one of the three or four most influential things he ever read".^[100] In 1955, he began an intensive study of this sutra, in a repeating weekly cycle, devoting one day to each of the six Pāramitās, and the seventh to the concluding passage on Samādhi. This was his sole reading on Desolation Peak, and he hoped by this means to condition his mind to emptiness, and possibly to have a vision.^[101]

James Joyce was also a literary influence on Kerouac and alludes to Joyce's work more than any other author.^[102] Kerouac had high esteem for Joyce and he often used Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique.^[102][103] Regarding On the Road, he wrote in a letter to Ginsberg, "I can tell you now as I look back on the flood of language. It is like Ulysses and should be treated with the same gravity."^[104] Additionally, Kerouac admired Joyce's experimental use of language, as seen in his novel Visions of Cody, which uses an unconventional narrative as well as a multiplicity of authorial voices.^[105]

Legacy

[edit]

Kerouac and his literary works had a major impact on the popular rock music of the 1960s. Artists including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, the Grateful Dead, and the Doors all credit Kerouac as a significant influence on their music and lifestyles. This is especially so with members of the band the Doors, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, who quote Jack Kerouac and his novel On the Road as one of the band's greatest influences.^[106] In his book Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, Ray Manzarek, keyboard player of The Doors, wrote "I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed."

The alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs wrote a song bearing his name, "Hey Jack Kerouac" on their 1987 album In My Tribe. Hip-hop group the Beastie Boys mention Kerouac in their 1989 song, "3-Minute Rule", from the album Paul's Boutique.^[107] The 2000 Barenaked Ladies song, "Baby Seat", from the album Maroon, references Kerouac.^[108]

As the critic Juan Arabia has written in relation to Kerouac's work and rock 'n' roll:

In order to vindicate the cultural, ideological and aesthetic advancement in Kerouac's work and its relevance–and the genesis of rock ‘n' roll–one must first understand the origins of jazz and its offshoots.

The first forms of jazz were formed in New Orleans from a melange of blues, work songs, marches, work songs, African and European music. Bop–the form of jazz that most influenced Kerouac–was created by African-American musicians in New York basements between 1941 and 1945. Bop arose as a reaction to the perception of musical theft perpetrated by white entertainers (e.g., Benny Goodman and his swing band) in an attempt to reclaim the cultural property of the black community which had informed every popular music genre. There has always been an exchange of ideas and musical forms between black and white communities. For example, Elvis sings gospel and blues and white country songs and some black rock n' roll artists sing in a manner similar to Elvis or borrow elements from European music or folk. Rock n' roll borrows elements from blues, country-western, boogie, and jazz.

This is the scenario that surrounds the dénouement of Kerouac's work. It's in 1948 that he finishes his first novel, The Town and the City; very soon after came the birth–and its explosion of popularity in the 1950s–of rock ‘n' roll.^[109]

In 1974, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was opened in his honor by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa University, a private Buddhist university in Boulder, Colorado. The school offers a BA in Writing and Literature, MFAs in Writing & Poetics and Creative Writing, and a summer writing program.^[110]

From 1978 to 1992, Joy Walsh published 28 issues of a magazine devoted to Kerouac, Moody Street Irregulars.

Jack Kerouac Alley in Chinatown, San Francisco

Kerouac's French-Canadian origins inspired a 1987 National Film Board of Canada docudrama, Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey,^[111] directed by Acadian poet Herménégilde Chiasson.^[112] Other tributes in French Canada include the 1972 biography by novelist Victor-Lévy Beaulieu Jack Kérouac (essai-poulet), translated as Jack Kerouac: a chicken-essay, the second in a series of works by Beaulieu on his literary forefathers, and two songs that came out within months of each other in 1987 and 1988: "Sur la route" by Pierre Flynn, and "L'ange vagabond" by Richard Séguin.

In the mid-1980s, Kerouac Park was placed in downtown Lowell, Massachusetts.^[113]

A street, rue Jack-Kerouac, is named after him in Quebec City, as well as in the hamlet of Kerouac, Lanmeur, Brittany. An annual Kerouac festival was established in Lanmeur in 2010.^[114] In the 1980s, the city of San Francisco named a one-way street, Jack Kerouac Alley, in his honor in Chinatown.

The character Hank in David Cronenberg's 1991 film Naked Lunch is based on Kerouac.^[115]

Kerouac was featured in clothing brand Gap's 1993 "Who Wore Khakis" campaign, using a black and white photo of the poet taken in 1958 in Greenwich Village.^[116]

In 1997, the house on Clouser Avenue where The Dharma Bums was written was purchased by a newly formed non-profit group, The Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence Project of Orlando, Inc. This group provides opportunities for aspiring writers to live in the same house in which Kerouac was inspired, with room and board covered for three months. In 1998, the Chicago Tribune published a story by journalist Oscar J. Corral that described a simmering legal dispute between Kerouac's family and the executor of daughter Jan Kerouac's estate, Gerald Nicosia. The article, citing legal documents, showed that Kerouac's estate, worth $91 at the time of his death, was worth $10 million in 1998.

In 2005, Kerouac was mentioned in the single "Nolwenn Ohwo!" by French pop singer-songwriter Nolwenn Leroy, released on her album Histoires Naturelles.^[117]

In 2007, Kerouac was posthumously awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.^[118][119]

In 2009, the movie One Fast Move or I'm Gone – Kerouac's Big Sur was released. It chronicles the time in Kerouac's life that led to his novel Big Sur, with actors, writers, artists, and close friends giving their insight into the book. The movie also describes the people and places on which Kerouac based his characters and settings, including the cabin in Bixby Canyon. An album released to accompany the movie, "One Fast Move or I'm Gone", features Benjamin Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and Jay Farrar (Son Volt) performing songs based on Kerouac's Big Sur.

In 2010, during the first weekend of October, the 25th anniversary of the literary festival "Lowell Celebrates Kerouac" was held in Kerouac's birthplace of Lowell, Massachusetts. It featured walking tours, literary seminars, and musical performances focused on Kerouac's work and that of the Beat Generation.

In the 2010s, there was a surge in films based on the Beat Generation. Kerouac has been depicted in the films Howl and Kill Your Darlings. A feature film version of On the Road was released internationally in 2012, and was directed by Walter Salles and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Independent filmmaker Michael Polish directed Big Sur, based on the novel, with Jean-Marc Barr cast as Kerouac. The film was released in 2013.^[120][121]

A species of Indian platygastrid wasp that is phoretic (hitch-hiking) on grasshoppers is named after him as Mantibaria kerouaci.^[122]

In October 2015, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in his honor.^[123]

The Cadets Drum and Bugle Corps based their 2022 production Rearview Mirror off of Kerouac's travels across America and his novel On the Road.

The 2023 Dierks Bentley song "Walking Each Other Home" opens with the lyrics "Kerouac gave me a book of poems."

Works

[edit]

Main article: Jack Kerouac bibliography

Poetry

[edit]

While he is best known for his novels, Kerouac also wrote poetry. Kerouac said that he wanted "to be considered as a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jazz session on Sunday.".^[124] Many of Kerouac's poems follow the style of his free-flowing, uninhibited prose, also incorporating elements of jazz and Buddhism. "Mexico City Blues," a collection of poems published in 1959, is made up of 242 choruses following the rhythms of jazz. In much of his poetry, to achieve a jazz-like rhythm, Kerouac made use of the long dash in place of a period. Several examples of this can be seen in "Mexico City Blues":

Everything
Is Ignorant of its own emptiness—
Anger
Doesnt like to be reminded of fits—

— fragment from 113th Chorus^[125]

Other poems by Kerouac, such as "Bowery Blues," incorporate jazz rhythms with Buddhist themes of Saṃsāra, the cycle of life and death, and Samadhi, the concentration of composing the mind.^[126] Also, following the jazz / blues tradition, Kerouac's poetry features repetition and themes of the troubles and sense of loss experienced in life.

Posthumous editions

[edit]

In 2007, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publishing, Viking issued two new editions: On the Road: The Original Scroll and On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition.^[127][128] By far the more significant is Scroll, a transcription of the original draft typed as one long paragraph on sheets of tracing paper which Kerouac taped together to form a 120-foot (37 m) scroll. The text is more sexually explicit than Viking allowed to be published in 1957, and also uses the real names of Kerouac's friends rather than the fictional names he later substituted. Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay paid $2.43 million for the original scroll and allowed an exhibition tour that concluded at the end of 2009. The other new issue, 50th Anniversary Edition, is a reissue of the 40th anniversary issue under an updated title.

The Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time on November 1, 2008, by Grove Press.^[129] Previously, a fragment of the manuscript had been published in the Burroughs compendium, Word Virus.^[130]

Les Éditions du Boréal, a Montreal-based publishing house, obtained rights from Kerouac's estate to publish a collection of works titled La vie est d'hommage (it was released in April 2016). It includes 16 previously unpublished works, in French, including a novella, Sur le chemin, La nuit est ma femme, and large sections of Maggie Cassidy originally written in French. Both Sur le chemin and La nuit est ma femme have also been translated to English by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, in collaboration with Kerouac, and were published in 2016 by the Library of America in The Unknown Kerouac.^[131][132]

Literary executorship and representation

[edit]

Since 2017, John H. Shen-Sampas, the son of Kerouac's brother-in-law, has been the chief literary executor for the estate of Jack Kerouac.^[133] Together with the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Shen-Sampas has worked to preserve and archive all aspects of Kerouac's life.^[134]

Discography

[edit]

Studio albums

[edit]

• Poetry for the Beat Generation (with Steve Allen) (1959)
• Blues and Haikus (with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims) (1959)
• Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation (1960)

Compilation albums

[edit]

• The Jack Kerouac Collection (1990) [Box] (Audio CD collection of three studio albums)
• Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road (1999)

References

[edit]

Notes

[edit]

1. ^ Jack Kerouac Archived April 22, 2022, at the Wayback Machine, Poetry Foundation.
2. ^ "Kerouac". Dictionary.com Unabridged (Online). n.d.
3. ^ Kerouac, Jack (September 15, 2016). The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings. New York: The Library of America. ISBN 978-159853-498-6. Archived from the original on June 28, 2022. Retrieved December 22, 2016.
4. ^ Swartz, Omar (1999). The view from on the road: the rhetorical vision of Jack Kerouac. Southern Illinois University Press. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-8093-2384-5. Retrieved January 29, 2010.
5. ^ Kerouac, Jack (June 1996). "Ma folle naissance crépusculaire - La nuit est ma femme". La Nouvelle Revue Française. Editions Gallimard. ISBN 207074521X. Archived from the original on May 12, 2016. Retrieved December 22, 2016.
6. ^ Pratte, Andre (November 8, 2016). Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America. Signal. ISBN 978-0771072413. Retrieved December 22, 2016.
7. ^ Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey (2018). After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. New York: Routledge. p. 64. ISBN 978-1-138-05405-9. Archived from the original on October 25, 2021. Retrieved November 26, 2020.
8. ^ Martinez, Manuel Luis (2003), Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera, University of Wisconsin Press, p. 26, ISBN 978-0-299-19284-6, Kerouac appeared to have done an about-face, becoming extraordinarily reactionary and staunchly anticommunist, vocalizing his intense hatred of the 1960s counterculture ...; id. at p. 29 ("Kerouac realized where his basic allegiance lay and vehemently disassociated himself from hippies and revolutionaries and deemed them unpatriotic subversives."); id. at p. 30 ("Kerouac['s] ... attempt to play down any perceived responsibility on his part for the hippie generation, whose dangerous activism he found repellent and "delinquent."); id. at p. 111 ("Kerouac saw the hippies as mindless, communistic, rude, unpatriotic and soulless."); Maher, Paul; Amram, David (2007), Kerouac: His Life and Work, Taylor Trade Publications, p. 469, ISBN 9781589793668, In the current political climate, Kerouac wrote, he had nowhere to turn, as he liked neither the hippies ... nor the upper-echelon ...
9. ^ Ann Charters, Samuel Charters, Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation, University Press of Mississippi, 2010, p. 113
10. ^ Jump up to:^a b Nicosia 1994
11. ^ Jump up to:^a b Dagier 2009
12. ^ "genealogie.org". Archived from the original on February 22, 2012.
13. ^ Alan M Kent, Celtic Cornwall: Nation, Tradition, Invention. Halsgrove, 2012
14. ^ Michael J. Dittman, Jack Kerouac: A Biography, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004
15. ^ Berrigan, Ted (1968). "The Art of Fiction No. 43: Jack Kerouac, pg. 49" (PDF). The Paris Review. Archived from the original (PDF) on May 28, 2008. Retrieved May 14, 2008.
16. ^ Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey (2018). After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. New York: Routledge. p. 64. ISBN 978-1-138-05405-9. Archived from the original on October 25, 2021. Retrieved November 26, 2020.
17. ^ Sandison 1999
18. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Fellows, Mark The Apocalypse of Jack Kerouac: Meditations on the 30th Anniversary of his Death Archived February 27, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, Culture Wars, November 1999.
19. ^ Jump up to:^a b "Jack Kerouac – bio and links". Beatmuseum.org. Archived from the original on March 22, 2012. Retrieved April 23, 2011.
20. ^ Desmeules, Christian (April 2, 2016). "L'autre Kerouac". Le Devoir (in French). Retrieved April 13, 2019.
21. ^ "La vie est d'hommage". Éditions Boréal (in French). Archived from the original on May 2, 2016. Retrieved April 26, 2016.
22. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Amburn, Ellis (1999). Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. MacMillan. pp. 13–14. ISBN 9780312206772.
23. ^ Miles 1998, p. 8
24. ^ Berrigan 1968, p. 14
25. ^ Jump up to:^a b Smith, Richard (2022). "'A model for the world': Jack Kerouac and Henry Thoreau". Thoreau Society Bulletin. 318: 1–2. exposure to Thoreau caused Kerouac to consider abandoning his scholarship and college education and 'living in the woods like Thoreau.'
26. ^ Moore, Dave (July 16, 2012). "Kerouac — "My really best friend…" an interview with Seymour Wyse by Dave Moore". www.emptymirrorbooks.com. Archived from the original on March 5, 2021. Retrieved March 23, 2021.
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63. ^ Suiter 2002, p. 237
64. ^ Berrigan 1968, pp. 19–20
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71. ^ Un dornad plu, Youenn Gwernig, Al Liamm, 1997, page 10.
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81. ^ Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 25332). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
82. ^ Maher, Paul (2014). Kerouac: His Life and Work. Maryland: Taylor Trade Publishing. p. 479. ISBN 978-1-58979-366-8.
83. ^ Hunt, Tim (2014). The textuality of soulwork : Jack Kerouac's quest for spontaneous prose. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-07216-3.
84. ^ Suiter 2002, p. 186
85. ^ Suiter 2002, p. 189
86. ^ Suiter 2002, p. 228
87. ^ Oxley, Dyer (August 29, 2023). "Fire lookout that author Jack Kerouac wrote about is in danger of burning in Washington state". KUOW. Retrieved June 8, 2024.
88. ^ "Jack Kerouac: Alone on a Mountaintop". The Culturium. June 2, 2024. Retrieved June 8, 2024.
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90. ^ Grobel, Lawrence (2000). Conversations with Capote. Da Capo Press. p. 32. ISBN 0-306-80944-3.
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95. ^ "Forthcoming from Library of America: Summer–Fall 2016 | Library of America". www.loa.org. Archived from the original on May 30, 2016. Retrieved April 26, 2016.
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99. ^ Cassady, Neal (1964). The First Third. Underground Press. p. 387. OCLC 42789161.
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102. ^ Jump up to:^a b Begnal, Michael, "I Dig Joyce": Jack Kerouac and Finnegans Wake, Philological Quarterly, Spring 1998
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104. ^ Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters. Penguin. 2010. ISBN 9781101437131.
105. ^ Begnal, Michael (2003). ""To be an Irishman Too": Jack Kerouac's Irish Connection". Irish Province of the Society of Jesus. 92 (368): 372. JSTOR 30095661.
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Sources

[edit]

• Berrigan, Ted (Summer 1968). "Jack Kerouac, The Art of Fiction No. 41". The Paris Review. Summer 1968 (43). Archived from the original on October 27, 2010. Retrieved November 6, 2010.
• Dagier, Patricia (2009). Jack Kerouac, Breton d'Amérique. Editions Le Télégramme.
• Knight, Brenda (1996). Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. Conari Press. ISBN 1-57324-138-5.
• Miles, Barry (1998). Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats. Virgin.
• Nicosia, Gerald (1994). Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-08569-8.
• Sandison, David (1999). Jack Kerouac. Hamlyn.
• Suiter, John (2002). Poets on the Peaks Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades. Counterpoint. ISBN 1-58243-148-5.

Further reading

[edit]

• Amburm, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. St. Martin's Press, 1999. ISBN 0-312-20677-1.
• Amram, David. Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac. Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002. ISBN 1-56025-362-2.
• 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. Neal Cassady Collected Letters, 1944–1967. Penguin, 2004. ISBN 0-14-200217-8.
• Cassady, Carolyn. Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg. Black Spring Press, 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.
• Chiasson, Herménégilde (1987). "Jack Kerouac's Road – A Franco-American Odyssey". Online documentary. National Film Board of Canada. Archived from the original on July 18, 2012. Retrieved October 25, 2011.
• Clark, Tom. Jack Kerouac. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984.
• Coolidge, Clark. Now It's Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & the Sounds. Living Batch, 1999.
• Collins, Ronald & Skover, David. Mania: The Story of the Outraged & Outrageous Lives that Launched a Cultural Revolution (Top-Five Books, March 2013).
• Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971. ISBN 0-684-12371-1.
• Dagier, Patricia (1999). Jack Kerouac: Au Bout de la Route ... La Bretagne. An Here.
• Dale, Rick. The Beat Handbook: 100 Days of Kerouactions. Booksurge, 2008.
• 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 University Press, 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 0-14-005269-0.
• Grace, Nancy M. Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination. Palgrave-macmillan, 2007.
• Goldstein, N. W. "Kerouac's On the Road". Explicator 50.1. 1991.
• Harma, Tanguy. The Paradox of Thanatos: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, From Self-destruction to Self-liberation. Peter Lang, 2022.
• Haynes, Sarah, "An Exploration of Jack Kerouac's Buddhism:Text and Life"
• Hemmer, Kurt. Encyclopedia of Beat Literature: The Essential Guide to the Lives and Works of the Beat Writers. Facts on File, Inc., 2007.
• Hernandez, Tim Z. "Mañana Means Heaven". The University of Arizona Press, 2013.
• 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.
• Hrebeniak, Michael. Action Writing: Jack Kerouac"s Wild Form. Carbondale IL., Southern Illinois UP, 2006.
• Huebel, Harry Russell. Jack Kerouac. Boise State University, 1979.available online
• 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, Joyce. The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. Viking Press. 2012.
• Johnson, Joyce. "Jack Kerouac's Journey" Archived August 14, 2022, at the Wayback Machine. The New York Review of Books, March 2, 2022.
• 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 University Press, 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 Haverty. Nobody's Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats. Creative Arts, 2000.
• Landefeld, Kurt. Jack's Memoirs: Off the Road, A Novel. Bottom Dog Press, 2014.
• Le Bihan, Adrien. Mon frère, Jack Kerouac, Le temps qu'il fait, 2018. (ISBN 9782868536341).
• Leland, John. Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think). New York: Viking Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-670-06325-3.
• Maher Jr., Paul. Kerouac: His Life and Work. Lanham: Taylor Trade P, July 2004 ISBN 0-87833-305-3.
• McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. Da Capo Press, 2003. ISBN 0-306-81222-3.
• 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.
• Nelson, Victoria. "Dark Journey into Light: On the Road with Jack Kerouac". Saint Austin Review (November/December 2014).
• Nicosia, Gerald. Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century. Noodlebrain Press, 2019.
• Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Grove Press, 1983. Revised edition Noodlebrain Press, 2022.
• Nicosia, Gerald. One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road. Viva Editions, 2011.
• Parker, Brad. "Jack Kerouac: An Introduction". Lowell Corporation for the Humanities, 1989.
• 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 0-670-87038-2.
• Walsh, Joy, editor. Moody Street Irregulars: A Jack Kerouac Newsletter
• Weaver, Helen. The Awakener: A Memoir of Jack Kerouac and the Fifties. City Lights, 2009. ISBN 978-0-87286-505-1. OCLC 318876929.
• Weinreich, Regina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac. Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
• Wills, David, editor. Beatdom Magazine. Mauling Press, 2007.

External links

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Library resources about
Jack Kerouac

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By Jack Kerouac

• Online books
• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

• Kerouac.net Archived September 11, 2017, at the Wayback Machine—An introduction to the life and work of Jack Kerouac, and the deep impact he had on our society and culture.
• JackKerouac.com – The Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for the Public Humanities's website is an interactive storehouse and exhibition space dedicated to Jack Kerouac and connected topics.
• Works by Jack Kerouac at Faded Page (Canada)
• Jack Kerouac at IMDb
• Jack Kerouac at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Jack Kerouac Papers Archived June 24, 2010, at the Wayback Machine at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University
• Jack Kerouac Papers, 1920–1977 Archived August 17, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, held by the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library
• "Writings of Jack Kerouac" Archived March 13, 2016, at the Wayback Machine from C-SPAN's American Writers: A Journey Through History
• The Kerouac Companion Archived August 29, 2013, at the Wayback Machine—The definitive key to the 600+ characters in Kerouac's novels.
• sur-les-traces-de-kerouac Radio documentary by Gabriel Anctil ans Jean-Philippe Pleau on Radio-Canada (2015)
• sur-les-traces-de-kerouac Archived October 18, 2019, at the Wayback Machine ebook by Gabriel Anctil & Marie-Sandrine Auger
• Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library Archived July 13, 2020, at the Wayback Machine, Emory University: Jack Kerouac collection, 1950-1978
• Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library Archived July 13, 2020, at the Wayback Machine, Emory University: Jack and Stella Sampas Kerouac papers,1940-1994
• Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library Archived July 13, 2020, at the Wayback Machine, Emory University: John Sampas collection of Jack Kerouac material, circa 1900-2005
• Works by Jack Kerouac at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) 

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Jack Kerouac, the American novelist and poet, is known for his thought-provoking quotes. Here are a few of his famous lines:

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• “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
• “Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.”
• “There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.”
• “If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.”
• “The road is life.”
• “The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.”
• “I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing.”
• “Enlightenment comes when you don’t care.”

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October 22, 1969

By JOSEPH LELYVELD

Jack Kerouac, Novelist, Dead; Father of the Beat Generation
Author of 'On the Road' was Hero to Youth--Rejected Middle-Class Values ack Kerouac, the novelist who named the Beat Generation and exuberantly celebrated its rejection of middle-class American conventions, died early yesterday of massive abdominal hemorrhaging in a St. Petersburg, Fla., hospital. He was 47 years old.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time," he wrote in "On the Road," a novel he completed in only three weeks but had to wait seven years to see published.

When it finally appeared in 1957, it immediately became a basic text for youth who found their country claustrophobic and oppressive. At the same time, it was a spontaneous and passionate celebration of the country itself, of "the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent."

Mr. Kerouac's admirers regarded him as a major literary innovator and something of a religious seer, but this estimate of his achievement never gained wide acceptance among literary tastemakers.

The Beat Generation, originally regarded as a bizarre bohemian phenomenon confined to small coteries in San Francisco and New York, spilled over into the general culture in the nineteen-sixties. But as it became fashionable to be beat, it became less fashionable to read Jack Kerouac.

Subject Was Himself

His subject was himself and his method was to write as spontaneously as possible by threading a hefty roll of teletype paper into his typewriter and setting down his story on one continuous sheet. What resulted he would later transcribe for forwarding to his publisher, but never revise, in principle, for he regarded revision as a form of lying.

Truman Capote called Mr. Kerouac's method of composition typing, not writing. But Allen Ginsberg, who regarded his friend as the greatest American poet of his time, declared that Mr. Kerouac had created "a spontaneous bop prosody."

Mr. Ginsberg appears in Kerouac novels under a variety of names--Carlo Marx, Irwin Garden, Adam Moorad and Alvah Goldbook--but is always immediately recognizable. This is true of all Mr. Kerouac's close friends, for there was little fiction in his novels.

As he painstakingly informed his readers in his long series of autobiographical works--which he intended to be read, ultimately, in sequence as one novel--Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Mass., on March 12, 1922, the son of French-Canadian printer.

Starred in Football

He spoke French before he spoke English and still had an accent when he made up his mind while still in high school to become a major American writer. But it was as a football player, a fast, agile fullback, that he first won any kind of recognition.

In 1939 he entered Horace Mann School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, with the promise of a football scholarship to Columbia University if he could prove himself academically.

His football career ended in spring practice of his freshman year when the coach, Lou Little, (later to appear in a Kerouac novel as "Lu Libble") told his young fullback to stop malingering after he was injured on a play. The injury, as Mr. Kerouac told the story, was a broken leg.

Giving up football cost him his scholarship to Columbia, but World War II would have interrupted his studies in any case. He served first in the merchant marine, then briefly in the Navy, from which he was discharged as "a schizoid personality."

It was immediately after the war that he had had the experiences that shaped him decisively as a writer. He returned to New York and became close to Allen Ginsberg, then a Columbia undergraduate, and William Burroughs, the scion of a wealthy St. Louis family. Mr. Kerouac was later to give them the titles of their best-known works--"Howl" and "Naked Lunch."

In those years, Mr. Kerouac was constantly on the move, from New York to Denver, then on to San Francisco, down to Mexico City, and back to New York. This was his discovery of America, the basis for "On the Road."

Much of his traveling was done in the company of a young drifter from Denver named Neal Cassady, who had a hunger for experience and a taste also for theology and literature. Inevitably, he became a main character of "On the Road," but he became much more--a literary model, supplanting Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway and William Saroyan.

Cassady had never been published, but he wrote voluminous letters--"fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed," Mr. Kerouac later recalled--that gave the aspiring novelist his idea of spontaneous style. Specifically the inspiration for "On the Road" was a letter from Cassady that ran to 40,000 words.

The word "beat," Mr. Kerouac once said, was first used by a friend to signify the feelings of despair and nearness to an apocalypse that impelled them to reach out for new experiences. The novelist later coined the phrase "beat generation," sometimes explaining that he took "beat" to mean "beatific."

Earlier, Mr. Kerouac had published a more conventional first novel--"The Town and the City," which was a minor critical success and a complete commercial failure when it was published in 1950 by Harcourt Brace after three years of writing and rewriting.

Delved Into Buddhism

In the books that followed "On the Road," the sense of loneliness and search became more clearly marked as their author delved into Buddhism--the first of the beat writers to look to the East for inspiration.

He called himself "a religious wanderer"--or "dharma bum," as he expressed it in the novel called "The Dharma Bums" in 1959. Allen Ginsberg said he was "a very unique cat--a French Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant."

Many critics found something ludicrous in his search for sensation and instant salvation on the byways of America. In a parody in the New Yorker magazine called "On the Sidewalk," John Updike portrayed two youngsters on a scooter riding "into the wide shimmering pavement" through a bed of irises. "Contemplate those holy hydrants," one of the boys calls out.

But there were moments when "On the Road" had a sharp edge of social comment, for instance when Sal Paradise (the name the novelist assigned himself) wanders through the black section of Denver "wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough life."

Eldridge Cleaver, the black writer, later cited this passage as a cultural turning point for white America.

"The Subterraneans," still one of the most popular Kerouac novels, was composed in only three days. The book ends with the novelist, at the end of an unhappy love affair, sitting down to "write this book."

He shunned literary society and spent most of his last years in a withdrawn existence in places like St. Petersburg, Northport, L. I., and his hometown of Lowell, where he maintained a residence in a ranch-style house with his invalid mother and his third wife, Stella.

"He had been drinking heavily for the past few days," his wife said yesterday morning. "He was a very lonely man."

The upheaval in values that "On the Road" helped signal had the ironic effect of making Jack Kerouac appear a somewhat conventional writer. He had no use for the radical politics that came to preoccupy many of his friends and readers.

"I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic," he said last month. He showed the interviewer a painting of Pope Paul VI and said, "You know who painted that? Me."