Kerouac, Jack

Kerouac, Jack (1922–69), Massachusetts‐born writer who attended Columbia University (1940–42) and roamed about and took odd jobs before he became associated with the Beat movement. His fiction, very loose in style and structure, includes The Town and the City (1950), tracing the Martin family from 1910 in Lowell, Mass., through the war years and the dispersal of the eight children; On the Road (1957), a quasi‐autobiographical tale of Beat people ranging around America seeking experience and fulfillment; The Dharma Bums (1958), a similar novel but with more emphasis on the discovery of truth or “dharma” through Zen Buddhism; The Subterraneans (1958), about a love affair between a Beat writer and a black girl; Doctor Sax (1959), an early novel fictively re‐creating the author's youth; Maggie Cassidy (1959), about the adolescent Jack Duluoz searching for love and identity; Tristessa (1960), portraying the morphine addiction of a Mexico City prostitute; Big Sur (1962), a sequel to On the Road, about the crack‐up and withdrawal to the Carmel area of a leader of the Beat movement; Visions of Gerard (1963), about the great grief of a French‐Canadian family of Lowell, Mass., when its religious young son dies; Desolation Angels (1965), treating the Beat generation just prior to the time of On the Road; and Vanity of Duluoz (1968), again drawing on his youth in a tale of “moral death and resurrection.” Pic (1971), a posthumously published novel, tells of a black jazz musician making his way from the South to Harlem. Mexico City Blues (1959) collects poems, Lonesome Traveler (1960) gathers travel sketches, Book of Dreams (1960) recounts his dreams in stream‐of‐consciousness style, Satori in Paris (1966) describes his French travels in quest of his ancestry and of illumination, or satori, and Visions of Cody (1960, in part; 1970, in full) gathers recollections, some about Neal Cassady, his traveling companion.