Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac
Kerouac by Tom Palumbo, c. 1956
Kerouac by Tom Palumbo, c. 1956
BornJean-Louis Kérouac
(1922-03-12)March 12, 1922
Lowell, Massachusetts, U.S.
DiedOctober 21, 1969(1969-10-21) (aged 47)
St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S.
Occupation
  • Poet
  • novelist
Alma materColumbia University
Period1942–1969
Literary movement
Notable worksOn the Road
The Dharma Bums
Big Sur
Desolation Angels
Spouse
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(m. 1944; div. 1948)​
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(m. 1950; div. 1951)​
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(m. 1966)​
ChildrenJan Kerouac
Signature

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac[1] (/ˈkɛru.æk/;[2] March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet[3] who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.[4]

Of French-Canadian ancestry,[5][6] Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens."[7] During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes.

Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements.[8] He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jerry Garcia and the Doors.

In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published.

  1. ^ Jack Kerouac Archived April 22, 2022, at the Wayback Machine, Poetry Foundation.
  2. ^ "Kerouac". Dictionary.com Unabridged (Online). n.d.
  3. ^ Kerouac, Jack (September 15, 2016). The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings. New York: The Library of America. ISBN 978-159853-498-6. Archived from the original on June 28, 2022. Retrieved December 22, 2016.
  4. ^ Swartz, Omar (1999). The view from on the road: the rhetorical vision of Jack Kerouac. Southern Illinois University Press. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-8093-2384-5. Retrieved January 29, 2010.
  5. ^ Kerouac, Jack (June 1996). "Ma folle naissance crépusculaire - La nuit est ma femme". La Nouvelle Revue Française. Editions Gallimard. ISBN 207074521X. Archived from the original on May 12, 2016. Retrieved December 22, 2016.
  6. ^ Pratte, Andre (November 8, 2016). Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America. Signal. ISBN 978-0771072413. Retrieved December 22, 2016.
  7. ^ Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey (2018). After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. New York: Routledge. p. 64. ISBN 978-1-138-05405-9. Archived from the original on October 25, 2021. Retrieved November 26, 2020.
  8. ^ Martinez, Manuel Luis (2003), Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera, University of Wisconsin Press, p. 26, ISBN 978-0-299-19284-6, Kerouac appeared to have done an about-face, becoming extraordinarily reactionary and staunchly anticommunist, vocalizing his intense hatred of the 1960s counterculture ...; id. at p. 29 ("Kerouac realized where his basic allegiance lay and vehemently disassociated himself from hippies and revolutionaries and deemed them unpatriotic subversives."); id. at p. 30 ("Kerouac['s] ... attempt to play down any perceived responsibility on his part for the hippie generation, whose dangerous activism he found repellent and "delinquent."); id. at p. 111 ("Kerouac saw the hippies as mindless, communistic, rude, unpatriotic and soulless."); Maher, Paul; Amram, David (2007), Kerouac: His Life and Work, Taylor Trade Publications, p. 469, ISBN 9781589793668, In the current political climate, Kerouac wrote, he had nowhere to turn, as he liked neither the hippies ... nor the upper-echelon ...