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.
Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kéroack (1889–1946) and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque (1895–1973).[9]
There is some confusion surrounding his name, partly because of variations on the spelling of Kerouac, and because of Kerouac's own statement of his name as Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac. His reason for that statement seems to be linked to an old family legend that the Kerouacs had descended from Baron François Louis Alexandre Lebris de Kerouac. Kerouac's baptism certificate lists his name simply as Jean Louis Kirouac, the most common spelling of the name in Quebec.[10] Kerouac's roots were indeed in Brittany, and he was descended from a middle-class merchant colonist, Urbain-François Le Bihan, Sieur de Kervoac, whose sons married French Canadians.[11][12]
Kerouac's father Leo had been born into a family of potato farmers in the village of Saint-Hubert-de-Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec. Jack also had various stories on the etymology of his surname, usually tracing it to Irish, Breton, Cornish, or other Celtic roots. In one interview he claimed it was from the name of the Cornish language (Kernewek), and that the Kerouacs had fled from Cornwall to Brittany.[13] Another version was that the Kerouacs had come to Cornwall from Ireland before the time of Christ and the name meant "language of the house".[14] In still another interview he said it was an Irish word for "language of the water" and related to Kerwick.[15] Kerouac, derived from Kervoach, is the name of a town in Brittany in Lanmeur, near Morlaix.[11]
Jack Kerouac later referred to 34 Beaulieu Street as "sad Beaulieu". The Kerouac family was living there in 1926 when Jack's older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever, aged nine. This deeply affected four-year-old Jack, who later said Gerard followed him in life as a guardian angel. This is the Gerard of Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard. He had one other sibling, an older sister named Caroline. Kerouac was referred to as Ti Jean or little John around the house during his childhood.[10]
Kerouac spoke French with his family and began learning English at school, around age six; he began speaking it confidently in his late teens.[16][17] He was a serious child who was devoted to his mother, who played an important role in his life. She was a devout Catholic, who instilled this deep faith into both her sons.[18] He later said she was the only woman he ever loved.[19] After Gerard died, his mother sought solace in her faith, while his father abandoned it, wallowing in drinking, gambling, and smoking.[18]
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 a desire to speak his parents' native tongue again. In 2016, a whole volume of previously unpublished works originally written in French by Kerouac was published as La vie est d'hommage.[20][21]
On May 17, 1928, while six years old, Kerouac made his first Confession.[22] For penance, he was told to say a rosary, during which he heard God tell him that he had a good soul, that he would suffer in life and die in pain and horror, but would in the end receive salvation.[22] This experience, along with his dying brother's vision of the Virgin Mary (as the nuns fawned over him, convinced he was a saint), combined with a later study of Buddhism and an ongoing commitment to Christ, solidified the worldview which informed his work.[22]
Kerouac once told Ted Berrigan, in an interview for The Paris Review, of an incident in the 1940s in which his mother and father were walking together in a Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York. He recalled "a whole bunch of rabbis walking arm in arm ... teedah- teedah – teedah ... and they wouldn't part for this Christian man and his wife, so my father went POOM! and knocked a rabbi right in the gutter."[23][24] Leo, after the death of his child, also treated a priest with similar contempt, angrily throwing him out of the house despite his invitation from Gabrielle.[18]
Kerouac was a capable athlete in football and wrestling. Kerouac's skills as running back in football for Lowell High School earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and Columbia University, where he enrolled in 1940.[25]
From around this time, Kerouac's journal includes an ambitious "Immediate Reading List," a wide-ranging list that includes sacred texts from India and China as well as a note to read "Emerson and Thoreau (again)."[25]
He spent a year at Horace Mann School, where he befriended Seymour Wyse, an Englishman whom he later featured as a character, under the pseudonym 'Lionel Smart', in several of Kerouac's books. He also cites Wyse as the person who introduced him to the new styles of jazz, including bop.[26][27] After his year at Horace Mann, Kerouac earned the requisite grades for entry to Columbia. Kerouac broke a leg playing football during his freshman season, and during an abbreviated second year 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, and joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity.[28][29] He was a resident of Livingston Hall and Hartley Hall, where other Beat Generation figures lived.[30][31] He also studied at The New School.[32]
When his football career at Columbia ended, Kerouac dropped out of the university. He continued to live for a time in New York's Upper West Side with his girlfriend and future first wife, Edie Parker. It was during this time that he first met the Beat Generation figures who shaped his legacy and became characters in many of his novels, such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, Lucien Carr, and William S. Burroughs.[33][34][35]
During World War II, Kerouac was a United States Merchant Mariner from July to October 1942 and served on the SS Dorchester before its maiden voyage.[36] A few months later, the SS Dorchester was sunk during a submarine attack while crossing the Atlantic, and several of his former shipmates were lost.[36] In 1943 he joined the United States Navy Reserves. 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".[37]
While a Merchant Mariner in 1942, Kerouac wrote his first novel, The Sea Is My Brother. The book was published in 2011, 70 years after it was written and over 40 years after Kerouac's death. Kerouac described the work as being about "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies." He viewed the work as a failure, calling it a "crock as literature" and never actively seeking to publish it.[38]
In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness in the murder of David Kammerer, who allegedly had been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. William Burroughs was also a native of St. Louis, and it was through Carr that Kerouac came to know both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Carr said Kammerer's homosexual obsession turned aggressive, finally provoking Carr to stab him to death in self-defense.[39] Carr dumped the body in the Hudson River. Afterwards, Carr sought help from Kerouac. Kerouac disposed of the murder weapon and buried Kammerer's eyeglasses.[39] Carr, encouraged by Burroughs, turned himself in to the police. Kerouac and Burroughs were later arrested as material witnesses. Kerouac's father refused to pay his bail; Kerouac then agreed to marry Edie Parker if her parents would pay the bail. They married on Tuesday 22 August 1944 in the Municipal Building, with two detectives as witnesses, before Kerouac was returned to his cell in the Bronx City Prison (their marriage was annulled in 1948.)[33][40][41] Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on a novel about the Kammerer killing entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Though the book was not published during their lifetimes, an excerpt eventually appeared in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (and as noted below, the novel was finally published late 2008). Kerouac also later wrote about the killing in his novel Vanity of Duluoz.
Later, Kerouac lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they had also moved to New York. He wrote his first published novel, The Town and the City, and began On the Road around 1949 when living there.[42] His friends jokingly called him "The Wizard of Ozone Park", alluding to Thomas Edison's nickname, "the Wizard of Menlo Park", and to the film The Wizard of Oz.[43]
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 life of the city. The book was heavily edited by Robert Giroux, with around 400 pages taken out.
For the next six years, Kerouac continued to write regularly. Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled "The Beat Generation" and "Gone on the Road", he completed what is now known as On the Road in April 1951, while living at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty.[45] The book was largely autobiographical and describes Kerouac's road-trip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady in the late 40s and early 50s, as well as his relationships with other Beat writers and friends. Although some of the novel is focused on driving, Kerouac did not have a driver's license and Cassady did most of the cross-country driving. He learned to drive aged 34, but never had a formal license.[46]
Kerouac completed the first version of the novel during a three-week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. Kerouac wrote the final draft in 20 days, with Joan, his wife, supplying him with benzedrine, cigarettes, bowls of pea soup, and mugs of coffee to keep him going.[47] Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paper[48] into long strips, wide enough for a typewriter, and taped them together into a 120-foot (37 m) long roll which 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 than the version which was eventually published. Though "spontaneous," Kerouac had prepared long in advance before beginning to write.[49] 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 the work was completed quickly, Kerouac had a long and difficult time finding a publisher. Before On the Road was accepted by Viking Press, Kerouac got a job as a "railroad brakeman and fire lookout" (see Desolation Peak (Washington)) traveling between the East and West coasts of the United States to earn money, frequently finding rest and the quiet space necessary for writing at the home of his mother. While employed in this way he met and befriended Abe Green, a young freight train jumper who later introduced Kerouac to Herbert Huncke, a Times Square street hustler and favorite of many Beat Generation writers.
According to Kerouac, On the Road "was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever Established and really must not be spoken about."[18] According to his biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley, On the Road has been misinterpreted as a tale of companions out looking for kicks, but the most important thing to comprehend is that Kerouac was an American Catholic author – for example, virtually every page of his diary bore a sketch of a crucifix, a prayer, or an appeal to Christ to be forgiven.[50]
In the spring of 1951, while pregnant, Joan Haverty left and divorced Kerouac.[51] In February 1952, she gave birth to Kerouac's only child, Jan Kerouac, whom he acknowledged as his daughter after a blood test confirmed it nine years later.[52] For the next several years Kerouac continued writing and traveling, taking long trips through the U.S. and Mexico. He often experienced episodes of heavy drinking and depression. During this period, he finished drafts of what became ten more novels, including The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Tristessa, and Desolation Angels, which chronicle many of the events of these years.
In 1953, he lived mostly in New York City, having a brief but passionate affair with Alene Lee, an African-American woman, and member of the Beat generation. Alene was the basis for the character named "Mardou" in the novel The Subterraneans, and Irene May in Book of Dreams and Big Sur. At the request of his editors, Kerouac changed the setting of the novel from New York to San Francisco.[53]
In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of his study of Buddhism. Between 1955 and 1956, he lived on and off with his sister, whom he called "Nin," and her husband, Paul Blake, at their home outside of Rocky Mount, North Carolina ("Testament, Va." in his works) where he meditated on, and studied, Buddhism.[54] He wrote Some of the Dharma, an imaginative treatise on Buddhism, while living there.[55][56] However, Kerouac had earlier taken an interest in Eastern thought. In 1946 he read Heinrich Zimmer's Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. In 1955, Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, titled Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, which was unpublished during his lifetime, but eventually serialized in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993–95. It was published by Viking in September 2008.[57]
