099.(LV3-5)Jack Kerouac Mini-Story

Publish Date: January 12, 2007
Jack Kerouac was an American novelist, writer, poet, and artist.
While enjoying popularity but little critical success during his own
lifetime, Kerouac is now considered one of America's most important
authors. His spontaneous, confessional prose style inspired many
other writers, including Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Hunter S.
Thompson, 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 conserva-
tive values of the 1950s. His writing often reflects a desire to break
free from society's structures 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 was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to a family of French-
Canadians.
Jack didn't start to learn English until the age of six, and at home he
and his family spoke 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'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. At Columbia, he wrote sev-
eral sports articles for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily
Spectator.
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 “Beat Generation”,
including Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs.
He wrote his first novel, The Town and the City, as well as his most
famous work, the seminal On The Road, while living in New York.
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).
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 pur-
chased the novel, demanding major revisions.
In 2007, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of On The Road, an
uncensored version of On The Road will be released by Viking
Press, containing text that was removed from the 1957 version
because it was deemed too explicit for 1957 readers. It will be
drawn solely from the original manuscript.
The book was largely autobiographical, describing Kerouac's road-
trip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal
Cassady. Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of
the post-World War II.
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
San Francisco-area poets, in the book The Dharma Bums, published
in 1958.
Kerouac developed a friendship with the Buddhist-Taoist scholar Alan
Watts. He also met and had discussions with the famous Japanese
Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki.
In 1955 Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, entitled
Wake Up, which was unpublished during his lifetime but eventually
serialized in Tricycle magazine, 1993-95.
He died on October 21, 1969 at St. Anthony's Hospital in St.
Petersburg, Florida. 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.