Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 - October 21, 1969) was a US novelist, writer, artist, and one of the most prominent members of the beat movement in literature. Kerouac's novels center around postwar American characters and their experiences. Kerouac was not just a pop artist, but a reactionary to his contemporaries.
Kerouac spent his life in the American landscape and with the people that fill them. Faced with the changing America, Kerouac sought to find his place in this climate and tried to effect a change. Kerouac's rejected the popular culture of the fifties that celebrated growing consumerism, the new suburban lifestyle, the social resistance to Communism, and the atomic age.
Biography
Early years
Born Jean-Louis Kerouac to a French-Canadian family in Lowell, Massachusetts. At an early age, he was heartbroken when his elder brother Gerard died, later prompting him to write the book Visions of Gerard.
His athletic prowess led him to be a star on his local football team, and this achievement earned him a scholarship to Columbia University in New York. It was in New York that Kerouac met the people whom he was to journey around the world with, and return to write about: the so-called Beat Generation, which included people like Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs. After breaking his leg and arguing with his coach, the football scholarship did not pan out, so Kerouac left to join the Merchant Marine.
Later years
In between his sea voyages, Kerouac stayed in New York with his friends from Columbia. He started writing his first novel, called The Town and the City, which was published in 1950 and earned him some respect as a writer.
Kerouac wrote constantly, despite not publishing another novel until 1957 when On the Road, published by Viking Press, finally appeared in print. This book dealt with his roadtrip adventures across the United States and into Mexico with Neal Cassady by its main protagonist, Sal Paradise. The novel is often described as the defining work of the post-war jazz-, poetry-, and drug-affected Beat Generation. He wrote it in an extended session of "spontaneous prose", or stream of consciousness, which created a style of writing entirely of Kerouac's own making. He was hailed in some circles as a major US writer, and reluctantly as the spokesman for the Beat Generation.
Kerouac died prior to finishing his "Duluoz Legend" project, which exists only as an incomplete autobiographical manuscript.
Death and afterwards
He died at the age of 47. Kerouac's health had been destroyed by a life of heavy drinking.
In 2001, the 'On the Road would be listed as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by the editorial board of the American Modern Library.
The progressive rock group King Crimson paid tribute to Jack Kerouac and his works with their album "Beat", which contained songs "Neal and Jack and me" and "Satori in Tangier".
A street is named after him in San Francisco.
Published works
Kerouac most familiar work is "On the Road". During his years of rejection by publishers, he wrote a number of (autobiographical) books, which he carried in his rucksack on reams of typing paper which he taped together so he did not have to pause to change the paper. These books include:
Other works include prose, poetry, Buddhist writings, and sound recordings. Kerouac writings maintain a sense of urgency while embarking on a journey during which he explores the society surrounding him by mystifying those experiences. Kerouac's writings contained a social and sexual recklessness (and descriptions of quasi-criminal activities) that surprised and upset readers of the time they were published.
Quotes
- "The world that [Kerouac] trembling stepped out into in that decade was a bitter, gray one". -- Michael McClure, San Francisco poet
- Kerouac was "locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle" in "the gray, chill, militaristic silence, [...] the intellective void [...] the spiritual drabness". -- Michael McClure, San Francisco poet
Futher readings
- Bartlett, Lee, (ed.) "The Beats: Essays in Criticism". London: McFarland, 1981.
- 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.
- French, Warren, "Jack Kerouac". Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.
- Goldstein, N.W., "Kerouac's On the Road." Explicator 50.1. 1991.
- Hunt, Tim, "Kerouac's Crooked Road". Hamden: Archon Books, 1981.
- Johnson, Ronna C., "You're Putting Me On: Jack Kerouac and the Postmodern Emergence". College Literature. 27.1 2000.
- Jones, James T., "Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend". Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.
- Mortenson, Erik R., "Beating Time: Configurations of Temporality in Jack Kerouac's On the Road". College Literature 28.3. 2001.
- Theado, Matt. "Understanding Jack Kerouac". Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2000.
External Links
Referenced By
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