Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969

Variant names
Dates:
Birth 1922-03-12
Death 1969-10-21
Birth 1922-03-12
Death 1969-10-21
Birth 1922
Death 1997
Gender:
Male
Americans
English, French, English,

Biographical notes:

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist of French Canadian ancestry, who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

Raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens. Kerouac spent much of his youth engaged in sports and other physical activities. His athletic prowess earned him a football scholarship to Columbia University where he matriculated in 1940, but he left Columbia in the Fall of 1941 after sustaining an injury that left him unable to play football.

In 1942, Kerouac joined the United States Merchant Marines, and in 1943 he joined the US Navy under the name John Louis Kerouac. He served eight days of active duty with the Navy before arriving on the sick list. According to his medical report, Kerouac said he "asked for an aspirin for his headaches and they diagnosed me dementia praecox and sent me here." The medical examiner reported that Kerouac's military adjustment was poor, quoting Kerouac: "I just can't stand it; I like to be by myself." Two days later he was honorably discharged on the psychiatric grounds that he was of "indifferent character" with a diagnosis of "schizoid personality".

While serving in the Merchant Marine in 1942, Kerouac wrote his first novel, The Sea Is My Brother, which was published over forty years after his death. He maintained close ties to members of the Columbia community. and lived in Manhattan's Upper West Side with his girlfriend, later first wife, Barnard student Edie Parker and her friend Joan Vollmer. It was through Parker that Kerouac met Columbia students Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr and their friends William Burroughs and Herbert Huncke. This group of friends and writers which would later form the nucleus of the Beat Generation, was the inspiration for much of Kerouac's work. His first published book was The Town and the City, and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, who published twelve more novels during his life, and numerous poetry volumes.

Kerouac is recognized for his style of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, life in New York, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. 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. He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Doors.

Though Kerouac's goal had long been to be a writer, the success of On the Road never sat entirely well with its author. Kerouac continued to write his thinly veiled autobiographical novels chronicling his bohemian, literary circle of friends, but in his personal life he began to pull away from the public eye and distance himself from his Beat Generation associated. He moved to Northport, Long Island to care for his aging parents and growing more personally and politically conservative.

In 1969, at age 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. All of his books are in print today.

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Subjects:

  • Mental Disorders
  • Schizophrenia
  • American literature
  • American literature
  • Alcoholism
  • Authors, American
  • Authors, American
  • American poetry
  • Poets, American
  • Automobile travel in literature
  • Beat generation
  • Beat generation
  • Beat generation
  • Beat generation
  • Beat generation in literature
  • Bohemianism
  • Bohemianism
  • Buddhism
  • Catholicism
  • Creative writing
  • Drug abuse
  • Literature, Experimental
  • Fan mail
  • Homosexuality
  • Jazz
  • Literature
  • Mothers and sons
  • Radicalism
  • Spirituality
  • American literature
  • Authors, American
  • Beat generation
  • Beat generation
  • Beat generation
  • Bohemianism

Occupations:

  • Writer
  • Authors, American
  • Poets

Places:

  • FL, US
  • NY, US
  • MA, US
  • Morocco (as recorded)
  • United States (as recorded)
  • United States (as recorded)
  • Mexico (as recorded)
  • Mexico (as recorded)
  • Morocco (as recorded)
  • Louisiana (as recorded)
  • Louisiana (as recorded)

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