Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, was an American novelist and poet and one of the central figures of the Beat Generation, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. He came from French-Canadian parentage and grew up in a French-speaking home. He learned English at about age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens, a fact that helps explain the distinct sound and movement of his prose.

Kerouac is best known for On the Road, published in 1957, the book that made him a Beat icon and brought him both fame and notoriety. His first published book was The Town and the City in 1950. During World War II, while serving as a United States Merchant Mariner, he completed his first novel, though it was not published until more than 40 years after his death. After On the Road, he published 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes.

His early life left deep marks on his imagination. Kerouac’s older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever in 1926, when Jack was four, and Kerouac later said Gerard followed him in life as a guardian angel. Gerard appears in his novel Visions of Gerard. His mother, Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque, was a devout Catholic who instilled faith in her sons, and Kerouac remained shaped by Catholic belief even as he later studied Buddhism. Religion, mysticism, childhood, poetry, literature, Buddhism, and life itself became recurring subjects in his work.

Kerouac was also shaped by movement, study, and sound. He was a capable athlete in football and wrestling, and his football skill earned scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and Columbia University. He enrolled at Columbia in 1940, wrote sports articles for the Columbia Daily Spectator, joined Phi Gamma Delta, and lived in residence halls where other Beat Generation figures also lived. At Horace Mann School, he befriended Seymour Wyse, who introduced him to new styles of jazz, including bop. Around this same period, Kerouac kept an ambitious reading list that included sacred texts from India and China, as well as Emerson and Thoreau.

Kerouac’s writing became known for stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. His work often returns to New York City and the Bay Area in the 1940s and 1950s, to spiritual searching, to memory, friendship, restlessness, and the attempt to catch life as it happens. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, though he despised the hippies and mostly remained uninterested in politics. Kerouac died on October 21, 1969. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, previously unseen works have been published, and his words continue to speak to readers drawn to speed, longing, faith, and the raw music of a mind in motion.