Jack Kerouac

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Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac by Tom Palumbo circa 1956
Born	March 12, 1922(1922-03-12) Lowell, Massachusetts
Died	October 21, 1969 (aged 47) St. Petersburg, Florida
Occupation	Novelist Poet
Nationality	American
Genres	Beat Poets
Literary movement	Beat
Notable work(s)	On the Road
Influences Thomas Wolfe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Marcel Proust, Jack London, James Joyce, Neal Cassady, Walt Whitman, Charlie Parker, Arthur Rimbaud, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Honoré de Balzac[citation needed]
Influenced Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Morrison, Roy Harper, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Tom Wolfe, Tom Waits, Jerry Garcia, Ben Gibbard, Joe Cutler, Russell Brand, Jim Dodge, The Hold Steady

Jack Kerouac (pronounced /ˈkɛr-o-ek/) (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist, writer, poet, and artist from Lowell, Massachusetts. Along with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, he is amongst the best known of the writers (and friends) known as the Beat Generation.

Kerouac's work was very popular, but received little critical acclaim during his lifetime. Today, he is considered an important and influential writer who inspired others, including Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan, and Ken Kesey, and writers of the New Journalism. Kerouac also influenced musicians such as The Beatles, Ben Gibbard, Bob Dylan,Tom Waits, Simon & Garfunkel, Ulf Lundell and Jim Morrison.^[1] Kerouac's best-known books are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.

[edit] Biography

[edit] Family and childhood

Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, in Lowell, Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kerouac and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque, natives of the province of Québec, Canada. Like many other Quebecers of their generation, the Lévesques and Kerouacs were part of the Quebec emigration to New England to find employment.

Kerouac often gave conflicting stories about his family history and the origins of his surname. Though his father was born to a family of potato farmers in the village of St.Hubert, he often claimed aristocratic descent, sometimes from a Breton noble granted land after the Battle of Quebec, whose sons all married Native Americans. However, research has shown him to be the descendant of a middle-class merchant settler, whose sons married French Canadians. He was part Native American, however, though through his mother's largely Norman-side of the family. He also had various stories on the etymology of his surname, usually tracing in back to Irish, Breton, or other Celtic roots. In one interview he claimed it was the name of a dead Celtic language and in another said it was from the Irish for "language of the water" and related to "Kerwick".^[2] The name, though Breton, seems to derive from the name of one of several hamlets in Brittany near Rosporden.^[3]

Jack Kerouac lived above this flower shop in Ozone Park.

Kerouac did not start to learn English until the age of six, and at home, he and his family spoke joual, a Quebec French dialect.^[4][5] When he was four he was profoundly affected by the death of his nine-year-old brother, Gérard, from rheumatic fever, an event later described in his novel Visions of Gerard. Some of Kerouac's poetry was written in French, and in letters written to friend Allen Ginsberg towards the end of his life he expressed his desire to speak his parents' native tongue again. Recently, it was discovered that Kerouac first started writing On the Road in French, a language in which he also wrote two unpublished novels.^[6] The writings are in dialectal Quebec French, and predate the first novels of Michel Tremblay by a decade.

Kerouac's athletic prowess led him to become a 100-meter hurdler on his local high school track team, and his skills as a running back in American football earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame and Columbia University. He entered Columbia University after spending a year at Horace Mann School, where he earned the requisite grades to matriculate to Columbia. Kerouac broke a leg playing football during his freshman season, and he argued constantly with coach Lou Little who kept him benched. While at Columbia, Kerouac wrote several sports articles for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator.

[edit] Early adulthood

When his football scholarship did not pan out, Kerouac dropped out of Columbia, though he continued to live for a period on New York City's Upper West Side with his girlfriend, Edie Parker. It was during this time that he met the people with whom he was later to journey around the world, the subjects of many of his novels: the so-called Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke and William S. Burroughs. Kerouac joined the United States Merchant Marine in 1942 and in 1943 joined the United States Navy, but was honorably discharged during World War II on psychiatric grounds (he was of "indifferent disposition").^[7]

In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as an accessory in the murder of David Kammerer, who'd been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. (William Burroughs was himself a native of St. Louis, and it was through Carr that Kerouac came to know both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.) When Kammerer's obsession with Carr turned violent, Carr stabbed him to death and turned to Kerouac for help. Together, they disposed of evidence. As advised by Burroughs, they turned themselves in. Kerouac's father at first refused to pay his bail. Kerouac then agreed to marry Edie Parker if she'd pay it. Their marriage was annulled a year later, and Kerouac and Burroughs briefly collaborated on a novel about the Kammerer killing entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Though the book was not published during the lifetimes of either Kerouac or Burroughs, an excerpt eventually appeared in Word Virus: A William S. Burroughs Reader (and as noted below, the book is now scheduled for publication in late 2008). Kerouac also later wrote about the killing in his novel Vanity of Duluoz.

Beginning of the original typed roll where Kerouac wrote On the Road. The first sentence is: "I first met met Neal not long after my father died..." Later it would be replaced by the definitive one: "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up".

Later, he lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they, too, moved to New York. He wrote his first novel, The Town and the City, and, according to at least John Clellon Holmes, began the quintessential On the Road around 1949 while living there.^[8] His friends jokingly called him "The Wizard of Ozone Park," a spoof of Thomas Edison's "Wizard of Menlo Park" nickname while simultaneously alluding to the title character of the film The Wizard of Oz and a shortened form of the word "ozone".^[9]

[edit] Early career 1950-1957

Kerouac tended to write constantly, carrying a notebook with him everywhere. Letters to friends and family members tended to be long and rambling, including great detail about his daily life and thoughts. Prior to becoming a writer, he tried a varied list of careers. He was a sports reporter for The Lowell Sun; a temporary worker in construction and food service; a United States Merchant Marine and he joined the United States Navy twice.

The Town and the City was published in 1950 under the name "John Kerouac," and, though it earned him a few respectable reviews, the book sold poorly. Heavily influenced by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe, it reflects on the generational epic formula and the contrasts of small town life versus the multi-dimensional, and larger, city. The book was heavily edited by Robert Giroux; some 400 pages were taken out.

For the next six years, Kerouac wrote constantly. Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled "The Beat Generation" and "Gone on the Road," Kerouac wrote what is now known as On the Road in April of 1951 while living at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty.^[10] The book was largely autobiographical and describes Kerouac's road-trip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady in the late-40's, as well his relationships with other Beat writers and friends. Fueled by coffee and Benzedrine, he completed the first version of the novel during a three week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paper ^[11]into long strips, wide enough for a type-writer, and taped them together into a 120-foot long roll he then fed into the machine. This allowed him to type continuously without the interruption of reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or paragraph breaks and was much more explicit then what would eventually be printed. Though "spontaneous", Kerouac had prepared long in advance before beginning to write.^[12] In fact, according to his Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the work in his journals over the several preceding years.

Though completed quickly, Kerouac had a long and difficult time finding a buyer for his work. Publishers rejected the manuscript due to its experimental writing style and its sympathetic tone towards minorities and marginalized social groups of post-War America. Many editors were also uncomfortable with the idea of publishing a book that contained, what was for the time, graphic descriptions of drug-use and homosexual behavior, a move that could result in obscenity charges being filed, a fate that later befell Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Ginsberg's Howl.

In late 1951, Joan Haverty left and divorced Kerouac while pregnant. In February of 1952, she gave birth to Kerouac's only child Jan Kerouac, though he refused to acknowledge her as his own until a blood test confirmed it 9 years later.^[13] For the next several years Kerouac continued writing and traveling, taking extensive trips though out the U.S. and Mexico and often fell into bouts of depression and heavy drug and alcohol use. During this period he finished drafts for what would become 10 more novels, including The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Tristessa, and Desolation Angles, which chronicle many of the events of these years.

In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of Kerouac's immersion into Buddhism. In 1955 Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, entitled Wake Up, which was unpublished during his lifetime but eventually serialised in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993-95.

House in Orlando, Florida where Kerouac lived and wrote The Dharma Bums

In 1957, after being rejected by several other firms, On the Road was finally purchased by Viking Press, which demanded major revisions prior to publication.^[12] Many of the more sexually explicit passages were removed and, fearing libel suits, pseudonyms were used for the books "characters." These revisions have often led to criticisms as to the actual spontaneity of Kerouac's style.^[11]

[edit] Later career 1957-1969

In July 1957, Kerouac moved to a small house on Clouser Ave. in the College Park section of Orlando, Florida to await the release of On the Road. A few weeks later, the review appeared in the New York Times proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation. Kerouac was hailed as a major American writer. His friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among others, became a notorious representation of the Beat Generation. His fame would come as an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing. Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the post-World War II Beat Generation and Kerouac came to be called "the king of the beat generation," a term that he never felt comfortable with. He once observed, "I'm not a beatnik, I'm a Catholic."

The immediate success of On the Road brought Kerouac instant fame. He soon found he had little taste for celebrity status. After nine months, he no longer felt safe in public. He was badly beaten by three men outside the San Remo Bar in New York one night. Neal Cassady, possibly as a result of his new notoriety as the central character of the book, was set up and arrested for selling pot.^[14][15]

Publishers were eager for a quick "sequel" to capitalize on On the Road's success. In response, Kerouac chronicled parts of his own experience with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco-area poets, in The Dharma Bums, set in California and Washington and published in 1958. It was written in Orlando, Florida between November 26^[16] and December 7, 1957.^[17] To begin writing Dharma Bums, Kerouac typed onto a ten-foot length of teletype paper, to avoid interrupting his flow for paper changes, as he had done six years previously for On the Road.^[16]

Kerouac was demoralized by criticism of Dharma Bums from such respected figures in the American field of Buddhism as Zen teacher Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Alan Watts. He wrote to Snyder, referring to a meeting with D. T. Suzuki, that "even Suzuki was looking at me through slitted eyes as tho I was a monstrous imposter". He passed up the opportunity to reunite with Snyder in California, and explained to Whalen, "I'd be ashamed to confront you and Gary now I've become so decadent and drunk and dontgiveashit. I'm not a Buddhist any more."^[18]

Kerouac also wrote and narrated a "Beat" movie entitled Pull My Daisy in 1959. Originally to be called "The Beat Generation", the title was change at the last moment when MGM released a film by the same name, sensationalized "beatnik" culture.

John Antonelli's 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie begins and ends with footage of Kerouac reading from On the Road and Visions of Cody on The Tonight Show with Steve Allen in 1957. Kerouac appears intelligent but shy. "Are you nervous?" asks Steve Allen. "Naw", says Kerouac, sweating and fiddling.

Kerouac developed something of a friendship with the scholar Alan Watts (cryptically named Arthur Wayne in Kerouac's novel Big Sur, and Alex Aums in Desolation Angels). Kerouac moved to Northport, New York in March 1958, six months after releasing On the Road, to care for his aging mother Gabrielle and to hide from his new-found celebrity.

[edit] Death

Kerouac died on October 21, 1969 at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, one day after being rushed with severe abdominal pain from his St. Petersburg home by ambulance.

Lowell, Massachusetts Gravesite, Lowell Massachusetts

His death, at the age of 47, resulted from an internal hemorrhage (bleeding esophageal varices) caused by cirrhosis of the liver, the result of a lifetime of heavy drinking.^[19] At the time of his death, he was living with his third wife Stella, and his mother Gabrielle. Kerouac is buried in his home town of Lowell and was honored posthumously with a Doctor of Letters degree from his hometown's University of Massachusetts - Lowell on June 2, 2007.

In 2007, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publishing, Viking issued two new editions: On the Road: The Original Scroll, and On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition.^[20][21] By far the more significant is Scroll, a transcription of the original draft typed as one long paragraph on sheets of tracing paper which Kerouac taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. The text is more sexually explicit than Viking allowed to be published in 1957, and also uses the real names of Kerouac's friends rather than the fictional names he later substituted. (Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay paid $2.43 million for the original scroll and is allowing an exhibition tour that will conclude at the end of 2009.) The other new issue, 50th Anniversary Edition, is a reissue of the 40th anniversary issue under an updated title.

In March 2008, Penguin Books announced that the Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks will be published for the first time in November 2008.^[22] Previously, a fragment of the manuscript had been published in the Burroughs compendium, Word Virus.^[23]

[edit] Works, style, and innovations

See also: Bibliography of Jack Kerouac

[edit] Style

Kerouac is generally considered to be the father of the Beat movement, although it must be said that he actively disliked such labels, and, in particular, regarded the subsequent Hippie movement with some disdain. Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of Jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, Kerouac would include ideas he developed in his Buddhist studies, beginning with Gary Snyder. He called this style Spontaneous Prose, a literary technique akin to stream of consciousness.

Jack Kerouac's poem in the center of his namesake alley.

Many of his books exemplified this approach including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. The central features of this writing method were the ideas of breath (borrowed from Jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and not editing a single word (much of his work was edited by Donald Merriam Allen, a major figure in Beat Generation poetry who also edited some of Ginsberg's work as well). Connected with his idea of breath was the elimination of the period, preferring to use a long, connecting dash instead. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words might take on a certain kind of rhythm, though none of it pre-meditated.

Kerouac greatly admired Gary Snyder, many of whose ideas influenced him. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder, and also whole paragraphs from letters Snyder had written to Kerouac.^[24] While living with Snyder outside Mill Valley, California in 1956, Kerouac was working on a book centering around Snyder, which he was thinking of calling Visions of Gary.^[25] (This eventually became Dharma Bums, which Kerouac described as "mostly about [Snyder]".)^[26] That summer, Kerouac took a job as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in Washington, after hearing Snyder's and Philip Whalen's accounts of their own lookout stints. Kerouac described the experience in his novel Desolation Angels.

He would go on for hours, often drunk, to friends and strangers about his method. Allen Ginsberg, initially unimpressed, would later be one of its great proponents, and indeed, he was apparently influenced by Kerouac's free flowing prose method of writing in the composition of his masterpiece "Howl". It was at about the time that Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans that he was approached by Ginsberg and others to formally explicate exactly how he wrote it, how he did Spontaneous Prose. Among the writings he set down specifically about his Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise would be Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty "essentials."

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Some believed that at times Kerouac's writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose. Truman Capote famously said about Kerouac's work, "That's not writing, it's typing." Despite such criticism, it should be kept in mind that what Kerouac said about writing and how he wrote are sometimes seen to be separate. According to Carolyn Cassady and other people who knew him he rewrote and rewrote. Some claim his own style was in no way spontaneous. However it should be taken into account that throughout most of the '50s, Kerouac was constantly trying to have his work published, and consequently he often revised and re-arranged manuscripts in an often futile attempt to interest publishers, as is clearly documented in his collected letters (which are in themselves wonderful examples of his style). The Subterraneans and Visions of Cody are possibly the best examples of Kerouac's free-flowing spontaneous prose method.

[edit] Influences

His technique was heavily influenced by Jazz, especially Bebop, and later, Buddhism, as well as the famous "Joan Anderson letter", authored by Neal Cassady.^[27]

The Diamond Sutra was the most important Buddhist text for Kerouac, and "probably one of the three or four most influential things he ever read."^[28] In 1955, he began an intensive study of this sutra, in a repeating weekly cycle, devoting one day to each of the six Pāramitās, and the seventh to the concluding passage on Samādhi. This was his sole reading on Desolation Peak, and he hoped by this means to condition his mind to emptiness, and possibly to have a vision.^[29]

[edit] Legacy

Kerouac is considered by some as the "King of the Beats", a title with which Kerouac himself was deeply uncomfortable.

Kerouac's plainspeak manner of writing prose, as well as his nearly long-form haiku style of poetry have inspired countless modern neo-beat writers and artists, such as painter George Condo, poet and philosopher Roger Craton, and filmaker John McNaughton.

In 1974 the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was open in his honor by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa University, a private Buddhist University in Boulder, Colorado. The school offers an MFA in Writing & Poetics, a BA in Writing and Literature, a Summer Writing Program, and MFA in Creative Writing.^[30]

In 2007, Kerouac was awarded a posthumous honorary degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.^[31]

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Bibliography of Jack Kerouac. (Discuss)

[edit] External links

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Jack Kerouac

• Kerouac Family Association bilingual Web Site
• Kerouac.com — Online Resource
• Jack Kerouac's Life
• Jack Kerouac GLBT page
• Jack Kerouac Bibliography
• Books comprising Jack Kerouac's Duluoz legend
• Key to the characters in Jack Kerouac's books, and their real-life counterparts
• Key to the real people represented in Jack Kerouac's books, and their fictional counterparts
• A more complete Jack Kerouac Character Key from the everything2 site
• Kerouac Alley — Jack Kerouac directory
• Interview with Jack Kerouac (Montreal, 1967) (in French)
• Blyler, Kerouac, and Bohemian Roads — Article linking Kerouac's novel On the Road with D.A. Blyler's Steffi's Club.
• American Writers: Jack Kerouac — A two-hour C-SPAN television show about Jack Kerouac
• Jack Kerouac's Road - A Franco-American Odyssey - A 1989 National Film Board of Canada production, directed by Herménégilde Chiasson
• "A Vision of Kerouac as The Shadow" — a six page comic about two guys in Indiana talking about Kerouac
• "About the Beat Generation", by Jack Kerouac — a definition of the Beat Generation in Kerouac's own words
• Dharma Bummed: A Marxist Analysis of Jack Kerouac and the Beats
• Language Is A Virus Kerouac's 'Belief and Technique for Modern Prose' and 'Essentials of Spontaneous Prose'
• Denver Beat Photo Tour
• Photos of the Kerouac Gas Station in Longmont, CO
• Neal Cassady's official site authored by his family and updated monthly with stories and photos
• Photos, Jack Kerouac's Last House, St. Petersburg, FL
• Dharma Beat — A Jack Kerouac website with articles on Kerouac including a Calendar and a Links page
• Jack Kerouac Project website
• Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! festival site
• Analysis of Kerouac's life and works from a Roman Catholic perspective
• A selection of front covers of various editions of On the Road
• Guardian article on the history of the play Beat Generation, written and left unpublished for almost 50 years
• The beat goes on: Tracing Kerouac's tracks 50 years later: A restless spirit and 'holy' pie endure By Charles M. Sennott, Boston Globe Staff | July 15, 2007
• On the Road Again: Friends and scholars recall the man behind the myth of Jack Kerouac. Compiled by Meghan O'Rourke, Slate, September 4, 2007