Jack Kerouac Biography and List of Works

American novelist and poet, leading figure and spokesman of the Beat Generation. Kerouac's search for spiritual liberation produced his best known work, the autobiographical novel ON THE ROAD, which appeared in 1957. The first beat novel was based on Kerouac's travels across America with his friend Neal Cassidy.

"I stuck my head out of the window and took deep breaths of the fragrant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments. The madman was a brakeman with the Southern Pacific and he lived in Fresno; his father was also a brakeman. He lost his toe in the Oakland yards, switching, I didn't quite understand how. He drove me into buzzing Fresno and let me off by the south side of town. I went for a quick Coke in a little grocery by the tracks, and here came a melancholy Armenian youth along the red boxcars, and just at that moment locomotive howled, and I said to myself, Yes, yes, Saroyan town."
(from On the Road)

Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the third child of working-class French-Canadian èmigrés. He learned English as a second language, and first the French-Canadian dialect joual. When he was four, his beloved older brother Gerald died. Kerouac believed that Gerald followed him as a guardian angel. Kerouac went to parochial school where he was educated by Jesuits. In high school he was a star athlete. In 1939 he entered Columbia University on a football scholarship, but soon dropped out. He joined the navy and was discharged during World War II on psychiatric grounds. Kerouac served as a merchant seaman and roamed United States and Mexico before publishing his first novel, THE TOWN AND THE CITY in 1950. The account of the decline of his own family received good reviews but Kerouac judged the novel as a failure.

While hanging around Columbia campus in 1944, Kerouac began to mix with a group of New York based intellectuals including William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, whose Bohemian life style and search for new philosophy profoundly influenced him. He was married for a short time to Edie Parker and after excessive use of Benzedrine he was hospitalised. Kerouac was addicted to the drug for most of his life.

On the Road was inspired by the drug-fuelled cross-country car rides that Kerouac made with Neal Cassidy. The book was written in three weeks and presented a new, spontaneous, unpolished style, the 'sound of the mind', which was similar to almost theatrical performance. It appealed to subculture folksingers, hipsters, mystics, and writers. Truman Capote condemned the work as 'just typing' but it made Kerouac a celebrated television personality. Neal Cassidy (1926-1968), the prototype for Dean Moriarty in the novel, gave a model for an alternative lifestyle.

Kerouac´s THE DHARMA BUMS appeared in 1958. It paved way for Zen Buddhism as the philosophy for the bohemian artists´ communities of San Francisco´s North Beach, southern California´s Venice West and New York City´s Greenwich Village. The novel contained a portrait of the poet Gary Snyder, on whom the novel's protagonist, Jaffe Ryder, was based.

Disappointed by the way his works were misunderstood Kerouac retired home where he was looked after by his mother. Kerouac felt his role as a spokesman for the beat generation something of a burden, but occasionally participated in the cross-country adventures. During these years he wrote a series of autobiographical novels. VISIONS OF GERALD (1963) was based on his childhood and SATORI IN PARIS (1966) is an account of his quest for his Breton ancestors. THE SUBTERRANEANS (1958), written in three days, depicted Kerouac's affair with a mulatto woman.

Kerouac suffered an abdominal haemorrhage whilst vomiting in his lavatory and died at home on October 21st 1969. A few month earlier Neal Cassidy's nude corpse had been discovered in Mexico. Kerouac's novel VISIONS OF CODY, written in 1951-52, was published posthumously in 1972. The work was written in a rambling style which had the improvisational quality of jazz. In 2000 appeared in digital format ORPHEUS EMERGED, the first full-length work of fiction of Kerouac published after Visions of Cody. The novella was originally completed in 1945; in the new format the work includes also an introduction by the poet and scholar Robert Creeley, photographs, biography of the author, excerpts from Kerouac's journals, bibliographies, etc.

Note: Originally the term "beat" meant "weary", but it was later connected to jazz music like the "hip" vocabulary and cool manners of the Counter Culture artists´. "Beat" also appeared in Norman Mailer's essay The White Negro (1957): 'The words are man, go, put down, make, beat, cool, swing, with it, crazy, dig, creep, hip, square.' Several magazines published articles on the Beats and lexicons of their jargon. Teenage followers were called 'beatniks" - it was the time when the Soviet Union put the satellite Sputnik in space. Jack Kerouac was among the first - perhaps the first - who coined the phrase 'the beat generation', source of the word 'beatnik'. The 'beats' rebelled against the conformity of 1950s society and valued artistic and personal freedom of expression.

On the Road (1957) - The novel tells of a group of penniless friends travelling around America in search of new experiences. Narrator, Sal Paradise, accompanies his friends on four separate trips as they travel the country, spending time in Colorado, California, Virginia, New York and Mexico. Carlo Marx is Allen Ginsburg and Neal Cassidy is Dean Moriarty. The headlong style of the narrator underlines the description of lifestyle based on beauty, alcohol, jazz, sex, drugs, and mysticism. Kerouac wrote the book over a period of just 20 days on a single roll of telegraph paper. The book was heavily revised by Malcolm Cowley. See: Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

For further reading: Kerouac: A Biography by A Charters (1973); Jack Kerouac by R.A. Hipkiss (1976); Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac by B. Gifford and L. Lee (1978); "On the Road": Text and Criticism, ed. by S. Donaldson (1979); Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac by Gerald Nicosia (1994) - Note: Kerouac's birthday in Lexikon der Weltliteratur (1988) is 13.3.1922! - In this calendar: March 12, 1922.

THE TOWN AND THE CITY, (1950)