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Born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, Jean Louis Lebris 'Jack' Kerouac
was the last of three children born to French-Canadian parents. Raised in a
French-Canadian community, Kerouac did not begin to learn English until he
entered school at the age of six and he did not become fluent until he entered
a public junior high school. At this same school, an eighth-grade English
teacher recognized and began to encourage Kerouac's writing talents. This
recognition of his potential engendered a passion for literacy and language
which stayed with Kerouac all of his life. He became a voracious reader, often
skipping classes in high school in order to select his own material at the
library. Also a talented athlete, Kerouac became a star on the school football
team and was offered football scholarships to both Boston College and Columbia
University. |
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Kerouac entered Columbia in 1940 after a successful year at prep school
where he played football, wrote for school publications, and developed a lively
interest in jazz. His record at Columbia was not as good. While he enjoyed his
Shakespeare class, he failed chemistry, and broke his leg early in the first
football season. After his injury his interest in classes declined further as
he spent his time reading the newly discovered works of Thomas Wolfe who would
influence him for years to come. In September of 1941 he quit football and
school and spent the next several years working at a variety of odd jobs,
including a stint in the merchant marine; in February 1943 he enlisted in the
Navy. He was honorably discharged a month later as an "indifferent character." During a second stint in the
merchant marine Kerouac had a vision of his true role in life, that of
"divine scribe" and he conceived the idea for a
connected series of stories about his adventures. |
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Back in New York in the spring of 1944 Kerouac married Edie Parker as a
means of raising bond money after a friend, Lucien Carr, involved him as a
material witness in a murder case. After a few months of living a
"normal" life in Michigan with his wife, Kerouac ran
off to join the merchant marine again, but jumped ship and wound up back in New
York. By 1945 Kerouac was living with his wife, his friend and mentor William
Burroughs, and Joan Vollmer. Kerouac had also formed a close friendship with
Allen Ginsberg by this time. Both young men were attempting to overcome the
boundaries and conventions of the times and were experimenting with religious
practice, sexual preferences, and drugs. Late in the year, weakened by
Benzedrine addiction, Kerouac developed thrombophlebitis and spent a month in
the hospital before returning home to his family to help nurse his father who
had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. The death of his father in 1946
provided a catharsis for Kerouac, who almost immediately after the funeral
began writing what would become his first novel,
The Town and the City (1950). |
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With the advance money from
The Town and The City Kerouac moved himself
and his mother to Colorado where he began conceptualizing the story which would
become
On the Road (1957), based in part on road
trips he took with Neal Cassady. When the advance money ran out Kerouac
returned to New York where, in 1951, inspired by a 23,000 word free form letter
from Cassady, he taped reams of paper together into a scroll and typed 175,000
words in twenty days--the first complete draft of
On the Road. Meanwhile, his marriage to Edie
Parker had been annualled and he had remarried in 1950, this time to Joan
Haverty. Not long after Kerouac finished his manuscript, Haverty threw him out
and filed for divorce, despite being pregnant with Kerouac's daughter. |
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Kerouac's search for a personal style was finally realized in late 1951
when a friend suggested that he "sketch" pictures
with words. This suggestion caused something to click in his mind and allowed
him to finally express what he was trying to do. The term he came up with was
"Spontaneous Prose," and the first true
example of it was
Visions of Cody (1952), originally part of
On the Road, but extracted as an independent
story. |
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Kerouac continued to write and to refine his style. His work never
received much favor with the established literary critics, especially during
the fifties when anything that seemed to support anarchy was vilified. In 1966
Kerouac married Stella Sampas, the sister of his childhood friend Sebastian
Sampas. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, of a ruptured stomach vein in
October 1969. |
