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Jack Kerouac

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Writers and critics

   CAPTION: Jack Kerouac

         Born:        March 12, 1922
                      Lowell, Massachusetts
         Died:        October 21, 1969
                      St. Petersburg, Florida
     Occupation(s):   Novelist
                      Poet
      Nationality:    United States
       Genre(s):      Beat Poets
   Literary movement: Beat
      Influences:     Thomas Wolfe
                      Fyodor Dostoevsky
                      Marcel Proust
      Influenced:     Tom Robbins
                      Richard Brautigan
                      Hunter S. Thompson
                      Ken Kesey
                      Tom Waits
                      Thomas Pynchon
                      Bob Dylan

   Jack Kerouac ( pronounced [dʒæk ˈkɛɹəwæk]) ( March 12, 1922 – October
   21, 1969) was an American novelist, writer, poet, artist, and part of
   the Beat Generation.

   While enjoying popular but little critical success during his own
   lifetime, Kerouac is now considered one of America's most important
   authors. The spontaneous, confessional prose style inspired other
   writers, including Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan, Hunter
   S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan. Kerouac's best known
   works are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur and Visions of Cody.

   He divided most of his adult life between roaming the vast American
   landscape and living with his mother. Faced with a changing country,
   Kerouac sought to find his place, eventually rejecting the values of
   the Fifties. His writing often reflects a desire to break free from
   society's strictures and to find meaning in life.

   This search led him to experiment with drugs and to embark on trips
   around the world. His books are often credited as the catalyst for the
   1960s counterculture. Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the
   age of forty-seven from an internal hemorrhage caused by his chronic
   alcoholism.

Life

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

   Jack didn't start to learn English until the age of six and at home, he
   and his family spoke Quebec French. At an early age, he was profoundly
   marked by the death of his elder brother Gérard, an event that later
   prompted him to write the book Visions of Gerard. Kerouac wrote some
   poems in French and in his letters to Ginsberg, towards the end of his
   life, he expressed the desire to speak his mother tongue again.

   Kerouac's athletic prowess led him to become a star on his local
   football team, and this achievement earned him scholarships to Boston
   College and Columbia University. He entered Columbia University after
   spending the scholarship's required year at Horace Mann School. Kerouac
   broke a leg playing football during his freshman year, and argued
   constantly with his coach, who kept him benched.

   During Kerouac's time at Columbia University, Burroughs and Kerouac got
   into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder committed by a
   friend, Lucien Carr; this incident formed the basis of a mystery novel
   the two collaborated on in 1945 entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in
   Their Tanks (the novel was never published, although an excerpt from
   the manuscript would be included in the Burroughs compilation Word
   Virus).

   His football scholarship did not pan out and he went to live with an
   old girlfriend, Edie Parker, in New York. It was in New York that
   Kerouac met the people with whom he was 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 Merchant Marine in
   1942 and in 1943 joined the United States Navy, but was discharged
   during World War II on psychiatric grounds (he was of "indifferent
   disposition").

   In between his sea voyages, Kerouac stayed in New York City with
   friends from Fordham University in The Bronx. He lived with his parents
   in the Ozone Park neighbourhood of the New York City borough of Queens
   after he was discharged from the U.S. Navy in 1943. He wrote his first
   novel, The Town and the City, as well as the quintessential On The Road
   while living there. His friends jokingly called him "The Wizard of
   Ozone Park" as a play on words referring to the film The Wizard of Oz.

   "The Town and the City" was published in 1950 under the name "John
   Kerouac" and earned him some respect as a writer. Unlike Kerouac's
   later work, which established his Beat style, it is heavily influenced
   by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe.

   Kerouac wrote constantly but could not find a publisher for his next
   novel for six years. 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, 1951 ( ISBN 0-312-20677-1).

   Part of the Kerouac myth is that fueled by Benzedrine and coffee, he
   completed the first version of the novel during a three week extended
   session of spontaneous confessional prose. This session produced the
   now famous scroll of On The Road. In fact, according to his Columbia
   professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the work
   in his journals over several years. His technique was heavily
   influenced by Jazz, especially Bebop, and later, Buddhism, as well as
   the famous Joan Anderson letter, authored by Neal Cassady.

   Publishers rejected the book due to its experimental writing style and
   its sympathetic tone towards minorities and marginalized social groups
   of the United States in the 1950s. In 1957, Viking Press purchased the
   novel, demanding major revisions ( ).

   In 2007, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of On The Road's
   publishing ( ), an uncensored version of On The Road] will be released
   by Viking Press, containing text that was removed from the released
   version because it was deemed too explicit for 1957 audiences. It will
   be drawn solely from the ( ) original scroll and the only things not
   included will be things that Kerouac himself crossed out.

   The book was largely autobiographical, narrated from the point of view
   of the character Sal Paradise, describing Kerouac's roadtrip adventures
   across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady, the model for
   the character of Dean Moriarty. 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, and once observed ( ), I'm not a beatnik,
   I'm a Catholic.

   Kerouac's friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and
   Gregory Corso, among others, defined a generation. Kerouac also wrote
   and narrated a "Beat" movie entitled Pull My Daisy in 1958. 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.

   He chronicled parts of this, as well as some of his adventures with
   Gary Snyder and other San Francisco-area poets, in the book The Dharma
   Bums, set in California and published in 1958. The Dharma Bums, which
   some have called the sequel to On the Road, was written in Orlando,
   Florida during late 1957 through early 1958.

   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). He also met and had discussions with the
   famous Japanese Zen Buddhist authority D.T. Suzuki.
   Jack Kerouac House, College Park section of Orlando, Florida.
   Enlarge
   Jack Kerouac House, College Park section of Orlando, Florida.

   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 appears in the New York Times
   proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation. Kerouac was hailed
   as a major American writer, and reluctantly as the voice of the Beat
   Generation. His fame would come as an unmanageable surge that would
   ultimately be his undoing.

   John Antonelli's 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie begins and ends
   with footage of Kerouac reading from On the Road and "Visions of Cody"
   from 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.

   In 1955 Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, entitled Wake
   Up, which was unpublished during his lifetime but eventually serialised
   in Tricycle magazine, 1993-95. Shortly before his death Kerouac told
   interviewer Joseph Lelyveld of the New York Times, "I'm not a beatnik.
   I'm a Catholic." After pointing to a painting of Pope Paul VI, Kerouac
   noted, "You know who painted that? Me." ( ).

   He died on October 21, 1969 at St. Anthony's Hospital in St.
   Petersburg, Florida, one day after being rushed, in severe abdominal
   pain, from his St. Petersburg home by ambulance. His death, at the age
   of 47, resulted from an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis of the
   liver, the result of a life of heavy drinking. He was living at the
   time with his third wife Stella, and his mother Gabrielle. He is buried
   in his home town of Lowell.

Career

   Kerouac realized he wanted to be a writer before the age of ten; his
   father was a linotypist and ran a print shop, publishing The Lowell
   Spotlight ( ). He 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 Merchant Marine and he joined the United States
   Navy twice. Throughout all of this he led a nomadic lifestyle, never
   having a home of his own. Alternatively, he lived with his mother,
   stayed with friends or camped out.

Style

   Kerouac is considered by some as the King of the Beats as well as the
   Father of the Hippies, although it must be said that he actively
   disliked such labels, and, in particular, regarded the 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, 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.

   Kerouac's motto was "first-thought=best thought", and 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 was the idea 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.

   Gary Snyder was greatly admired by Kerouac, and many of his ideas
   influenced Kerouac. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain
   climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder. Kerouac took a job as a fire
   lookout in the North Cascade Mountains (Washington State) one summer on
   Snyder's recommendation, which was a difficult but ultimately rewarding
   experience. Kerouac described the experience in his novel Desolation
   Angels.

   He would go on for hours to friends and strangers about his method,
   often drunk, which at first wasn't well received by Ginsberg. He had an
   acute awareness of the need to sell literature (to publishers) as much
   as write it, though Ginsberg would later be one of its great
   proponents, and indeed 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 yr own house
    4. Be in love with yr 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 centre of interest is the eye within the eye
   17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
   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

   "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,
    mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,
       the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn,
    burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across
                                                              the stars.."
       —From Kerouac's famous novel "On The Road" which demonstrates his
                                 beautiful use of imagery in a beat style.

   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 50's, 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 of writing.

Trivia

     * Kerouac was an avid athlete; he was a high school football star and
       earned a scholarship to play football at Columbia University in New
       York, and was known to be a fan of boxing.
     * Kerouac mentions his best friends George Apostolos and Sebastian
       Sampas, killed during World War II, on numerous occasions
       throughout his writings ( ).
     * Kerouac's boyhood friends George Apostolos and Sammy Sampas were
       the uncle and cousin, respectively, of Ted Leonsis the prominent
       businessman. ( ).
     * The 1995 collection of Kerouac letters edited by Ann Charters is
       dedicated to Sebastian “Sammy” Sampas, Kerouac’s boyhood friend,
       who died in World War II.
     * Legendarily, On the Road was written in just three weeks, on one
       continuous roll of teletype paper. (In fact, this is true with
       qualifications only; see discussion at On the Road.)
     * At the time of his death in 1969, Kerouac's estate was worth little
       more than ninety-one dollars, but by 2004 had grown to an estimated
       $20 million.
     * Kerouac did not learn to drive until 1956 (at age 34) and he never
       had a driver's license.
     * The alley that separates the infamous City Lights Bookstore and
       Vesuvio Saloon on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco's North Beach
       neighbourhood is officially named by the city as Jack Kerouac
       Alley. The alley is famous for being a meeting ground for many
       luminaires of the Beat Generation, including Kerouac who often
       frequented Vesuvio indulging in alcohol.
     * Kerouac was related to Brother Marie Victorin (born Conrad Kirouac)
       from his father's side, while his mother was second cousin with
       Quebec Premier René Lévesque.

Influence

          Related article: Jack Kerouac in popular culture.

   Kerouac is considered by some as the "King of the Beats" as well as the
   "Father of the Hippies". 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 George Condo
   (Painter), Roger Craton (Poet and Philosopher), and John McNaughton
   (filmmaker).

Quotes

     * "I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for
       money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own
       subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will
       understand because they are the same that far down." : Jack Kerouac
     * "If you're working with words, it's got to be poetry. I grew up
       with [the books of Jack] Kerouac. If he hadn't wrote On The Road,
       the Doors would have never existed. Morrison read On The Road down
       in Florida, and I read it in Chicago. That sense of freedom,
       spirituality, and intellectuality in On The Road — that's what I
       wanted in my own work." : Ray Manzarek, The Doors' keyboard player
     * "I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it
       changed everyone else's." : Bob Dylan
     * "Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in
       1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own
       language." : Bob Dylan ( ).
     * "Once when Kerouac was high on psychedelics with Timothy Leary, he
       looked out the window and said, 'Walking on water wasn't built in a
       day.' Our goal was to save the planet and alter human
       consciousness. That will take a long time, if it happens at all." :
       Allen Ginsberg
     * "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

Film

   What Happened to Kerouac?

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