KEROUAC, JACK 1922-1969

BE at novelist

The Right Time

Jack Kerouac was a writer who earned his place in cultural history because of timing more than literary merit. In his books, most notably On the Road (1957), he expresses the spirit of the 1950s for an audience aimlessly seeking a suitable mode of expression. Kerouac's depiction of a band of free spirits discovering themselves as they improvised their way across America in what was intended to be a real-life analogue to a jazz-ensemble improvisation struck a chord with young iconoclastic readers. Kerouac became a representative figure, the king of the Beats.

Background

When his father died in 1948, Kerouac's future looked dismal. He had done nothing so consistently as fail. He had attended Columbia University between 1940 and 1942 and hoped to play football, but, because of an injury and a characteristic lack of resolve, he quit the team. Academically he did no better, though he did show a promising interest in creative writing. After dropping out of college, he joined the U.S. Navy in 1943. Within six months he had been discharged for mental instability and had returned to upper Manhattan, where he took up with a group of equally unstable Columbia students, including poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist William S. Burroughs, who introduced him to drugs and a bohemian lifestyle.

Hit the Road

In 1944 Kerouac was indicted as an accomplice when a friend killed a man in a fight. When Leo Kerouac refused to pay his son's bail, Jack Kerouac got married so his new wife's grandfather could be induced to pay. The marriage was shorter than his stint in the navy. Kerouac left his wife and took to the road on his own, deciding somewhere along the way to become a professional writer like his Beat friends Ginsberg and Burroughs.

Literary Career

Kerouac's first novel, The Town & the City, was published in 1950, when he was twenty-eight. He wrote it after his father died, in hopes of earning enough to provide for his mother's support. The novel, based on personal experience, is about a young man who splits with his family and his town to strike out for the city in a quest for identity and fulfillment. It stakes out his literary territory and his creative method. His subject is what he called the Beat Generation, by which he meant restless hipsters like himself, receptive to the values implied by spontaneity and unwilling to accept the stultification of conformity. His literary method was constituted by the use of emotive realism in which he refused to censor his feelings. "Godamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings," he explained to a Paris Review interviewer in 1967.

On the Road.

Kerouac's second novel, On the Road, was written in the early 1950s. When it was published in 1957, the Beat Generation adopted it as their bible. The novel was touted as an example of a new form, "spontaneous prose," and was rumored to have been typed in a single amphetamine-driven burst of inspiration on a roll of teletype paper chosen so Kerouac would not have to suffer the interruptions of moving from one piece of typewriter paper to another. That story bore only passing resemblance to the truth (in fact, researchers have found that the novel was written, edited, and rewritten), but the point is valid. The novel is about striking out, exploring the limits of freedom, appreciating beauty, making new acquaintances, coming to know what you believe—spontaneity.

Critics

Reviews were generally hostile, with the no-table exception of the New York Times. Gilbert Millstein (stand-in reviewer for the staid Orville Prescott, who hated the book) announced that publication of On the Road was a historic occasion and named Kerouac as the spokesman and exemplar of the Beat Generation. Dan Wakefield recalls in New York in the Fifties (1992), "You had to read, or at least try to read, On the Road, in the fall of 1957, simply to be able to express your dislike of it with authority at the bars and coffeehouses where such things were discussed." Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice said, "After that Millstein review in the Times, if you didn't read it, you were a square."

Aftermath

For the rest of his life Kerouac lived off the reputation of his second novel. He produced books at the rate of more than one a year until his death, but none has had the impact of On the Road. His most successful subsequent novels were Subterraneans (1958), read as an exposé of beatnik life, and Dharma Bums (1958), a wander novel that grew out of his interest in Buddhism. But even these sold on the basis of Kerouac's reputation.

The End

By the late 1950s Kerouac had little creative to offer. He had become a pitiful, reclusive, intolerant figure whose mind had been damaged and whose health had been destroyed by drugs and alcohol. In his last years he complained about the youthful spirit of the 1960s that some said his work had inspired. He died having clearly outlived his time at the age of forty-seven in 1969.

Jack Kerouac

Born: March 12, 1922
Lowell, Massachusetts
Died: October 21, 1969
St. Petersburg, Florida
American writer

J ack Kerouac, an American writer, is best known for On the Road, (1957) which describes his travels into the American West. He is known as the father of the Beat Generation, younger intellectuals who rejected traditional values of society.

Early years

Born March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac was the son of Leo Kerouac, a printer, and Gabrielle Levesque, a factory worker. Kerouac loved to read and wanted to be a writer from his earliest childhood. He did not speak English until he was five years old, using instead a combination of French and English used by the many French-Canadians who settled in New England. Kerouac's older brother Gerard died at age nine; he also had an older sister. At age eleven Kerouac began writing novels and made-up accounts of horse races, football games, and baseball games.

Kerouac received a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York City. At age seventeen he went to Horace Mann High School in New York City to improve his grades and increase his weight. In 1940 Kerouac arrived at Columbia but broke his leg in the second game of the season. After the injury he began to pursue his true passion—literature. Kerouac began to cut class regularly; he studied the style of writer Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) and hung out on the New York City streets. In 1941 Kerouac had an argument with Columbia's football coach and left school.

Outside influences

Kerouac worked briefly at a gas station and as a sports reporter for a newspaper in Lowell. He then signed on to work aboard the S. S. Dorchester bound for Greenland. After that trip Kerouac returned to Columbia for a short stay. In 1943 he joined the Navy, but he was honorably discharged after six months. Kerouac spent the war years working as a merchant seaman and hanging around Columbia with intellectuals such as writers William Burroughs (1914–1997) and Allen Ginsburg (1926–1997). He wrote two novels during this time, The Sea Is My Brother and And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, with Burroughs.

Kerouac married Edie Parker in 1944, but the marriage lasted only two months. In 1947 Neal Cassady, a car thief and ladies' man who was considered something of a genius, visited New York and asked Kerouac to give him writing lessons. When Cassady returned to Denver, Colorado, Kerouac followed. After a few weeks in Denver, Kerouac wandered into California, beginning a four-year period of travel throughout the West. When not on the road, he was in New York working on his novel The Town and The City, which was published in 1950.

Most famous work

Now married to Joan Haverty, whom Kerouac proposed to after knowing her for only a few days, Kerouac began to experiment with a more natural writing style. He wanted to write the way he lived: once and with no editing. In April 1951 Kerouac threaded a huge roll of paper into his typewriter and wrote the single 175,000-word paragraph that became On The Road. The more than 100-foot scroll was written in three weeks but was not published for seven years. Sal and Neal, the main characters, scoff at established values and live by a romantic code born out off the West. They are described as "performing our one noble function of the time, move. " And to Kerouac, with movement comes wisdom and meaning.

In the time between writing On The Road and its publication, Kerouac took many road trips, ended his second marriage, became depressed and addicted to drugs and alcohol, and did his most ambitious writing. Kerouac often wrote complete works through all-night, week-long sessions. His other works include Visions of Cody (1952), Dr. Sax (1952), Maggie Cassidy (1953) (a romantic tale of his teenage days), Mexico City Blues and Tristessa (both 1955), and Visions of Gerard, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and Old Angel Midnight (all 1956).

Spokesman for a generation

When On The Road was published in 1957, Kerouac became instantly famous and a spokesman for the Beat Generation, young people in the 1950s and 1960s who scorned middle-class values. Kerouac frequently appeared drunk, and interviews with him usually turned into arguments. In 1958 he wrote The Dharma Bums, a follow-up to On The Road. He then stopped writing for four years. By 1960 he was an alcoholic and had suffered a nervous breakdown. Kerouac died of massive stomach bleeding on October 21, 1969, with a pad in his lap and pen in his hand. He was buried with the rest of his family near Lowell.

For More Information

Amburn, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

Clark, Tom. Jack Kerouac. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1984.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957. Multiple reprints.

Miles, Barry. Jack Kerouac—King of the Beats. New York: H. Holt, 1998.

Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Grove Press, 1983.