Author Profile: Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

BIO

Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Kerouac, in Lowell, Massachusetts on March 12, 1922. The youngest of three children, he spoke a local dialect of French called joual before he learned English.  Kerouac published his first short story, "The Brothers," right out of high school, while attending a post graduate program at Horace Mann Prep School in New York City.  From there, he went on to study at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Although he attended Columbia for only one year, he became good friends with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, among others.  It was this core group of writers, led by Kerouac, who grew to fame and came to be called the Beat Generation.

Kerouac's first novel, THE TOWN AND THE COUNTRY, was well received but did not make him famous.  He would not be published again for nearly ten years.  The spontaneous and unrestricted prose style that would come to define his work emerged later in novels like THE DHARMA BUMS and ON THE ROAD.  He died in 1969 at just 47 years of age.

STATS

- Jack Kerouac is born at 5 o'clock p.m. on March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. He is the third child of Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac.

- He wrote as a young boy and cites novelist Thomas Wolfe as an inspiration.

- Kerouac attends Columbia University on a football scholarship. Is nominated sophomore class vice-president.  Drops out before matriculating a second year.

- Kerouac completes his first novel The Town and the City in 1948.  It is published two years later in 1950.

- Married three times.

- There is an annual Kerouac festival in Lowell, Massachusetts (Jack's hometown).

- Kerouac invented the term "Beat Generation" during a conversation with fellow novelist John Clellon Holmes.

- Dies at 47, at home, in St. Petersburg, Florida

ARTICLE

Jack Kerouac is generally seen as one of the great writers of his generation, but what is truly amazing is the fact that he was and has become much more than that.  He was a statesman for the "beat" period of American culture, he was an idol to people of his generation, and he has survived in memory as an icon of American cool.  We think of him when we think of jazz, we think of him when we think of adventure and freedom in literature, and we will always think of him when we imagine the "road."  Few modern writers have touched so many lives in so many ways.

Kerouac had an interesting view of his own life, imagining his adventures as one "enormous comedy, seen through the eyes of poor Ti Jean (me), otherwise known as Jack Duluoz, the world of raging action and folly and also of gentle sweetness seen through the keyhole of his eye."  This comedy was to include all of his fiction, from ON THE ROAD to BIG SUR, in a volume that synthesized a life into one single piece.  Kerouac was a man blessed with a lucid vision of life whose flip-side of vulnerability and sensitivity was to lead him through a series of breakdowns in his lifetime.  Sadly, alcohol became a companion to this tender side, and eventually took Jack Kerouac's life.

What is perhaps most striking about the Duluoz Legend (Kerouac's enormous comedy) is the optimism and humor, despite the pain that so clearly marks his last days.  By BIG SUR, much of the lightness of his earlier work is absent, replaced by intense introspection and doubt.  But we can accept his optimism in the passages of beauty that emerge amid the pain, because the author senses something greater about his earth and his existence.  Perhaps it derives from the collection of moments we are given to be a living part of this universe, perhaps it stems from the energy that maintains all living things.  Whatever the source of joy, Kerouac's scope is grand, his ability to share of himself is inspiring, and finally, the body of work he left us --- the Legend of Jack Kerouac --- is its own redemption.

--- Thomas King