Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac, original name Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, (born March 12, 1922, Lowell, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 21, 1969, St. Petersburg, Florida), American novelist, poet, and leader of the Beat movement whose most famous book, On the Road (1957), had broad cultural influence before it was recognized for its literary merits. On the Road captured the spirit of its time as no other work of the 20th century had since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925).
Childhood and early influences
Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town, had a large French Canadian population. While Kerouac’s mother worked in a shoe factory and his father worked as a printer, Kerouac attended a French Canadian school in the morning and continued his studies in English in the afternoon. He spoke joual, a Canadian dialect of French, and so, though he was an American, he viewed his country as if he were a foreigner. Kerouac subsequently went to the Horace Mann School, a preparatory school in New York City, on a gridiron football scholarship. There he met Henri Cru, who helped Kerouac find jobs as a merchant seaman, and Seymour Wyse, who introduced Kerouac to jazz.
In 1940 Kerouac enrolled at Columbia University, where he met two writers who would become lifelong friends: Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Together with Kerouac, they are the seminal figures of the literary movement known as Beat, a term introduced to Kerouac by Herbert Huncke, a Times Square junkie, petty thief, hustler, and writer. It meant “down-and-out” as well as “beatific” and therefore signified the bottom of existence (from a financial and an emotional point of view) as well as the highest, most spiritual high.
Kerouac’s childhood and early adulthood were marked by loss: his brother Gerard died in 1926, at age nine. Kerouac’s boyhood friend Sebastian Sampas died in 1944 and his father, Leo, in 1946. In a deathbed promise to Leo, Kerouac pledged to care for his mother, Gabrielle, affectionately known as Memere. Kerouac was married three times: to Edie Parker (1944); to Joan Haverty (1951), with whom he had a daughter, Jan Michelle; and to Stella Sampas (1966), the sister of Sebastian, who had died at Anzio, Italy, during World War II.
On the Road and other early work
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By the time Kerouac and Burroughs met in 1944, Kerouac had already written a million words. More words came in the wake of Kerouac’s brief detainment in August 1944, when friend and fellow Beat Lucien Carr—who had introduced him to Burroughs and Ginsberg—confessed to having killed David Kammerer, a longtime admirer whose advances had gotten aggressive, in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. Kerouac assisted Carr in disposing of Kammerer’s glasses and the knife used in the killing. When Carr eventually confessed to the police, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness. He was bailed out by Parker’s parents; at that time she was his girlfriend, and her parents insisted that the couple marry before he was released. Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on a novelization of the events, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, soon after. It went unpublished until 2008.
In 1944 Kerouac also wrote a novella, a roman à clef about his childhood in Massachusetts. He left it unfinished, however, and then lost the manuscript, which was eventually sold at auction for nearly $100,000 in 2002, having been discovered years earlier in a Columbia University dorm. It was published, along with some of Kerouac’s notes on the book and some letters to his father, as The Haunted Life, and Other Writings in 2014. That novella was just one expression of Kerouac’s boyhood ambition to write “the great American novel.” His first published novel, The Town & the City (1950), received favourable reviews but was considered derivative of the novels of Thomas Wolfe, whose Time and the River (1935) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) were then popular. In his novel Kerouac articulated the “New Vision,” that “everything was collapsing,” a theme that would dominate his grand design to have all his work taken together as “one vast book”—The Legend of Duluoz.
Yet Kerouac was unhappy with the pace of his prose. The music of bebop jazz artists Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker began to drive Kerouac toward his “spontaneous bop prosody,” as Ginsberg later called it, which took shape in the late 1940s through various drafts of his second novel, On the Road. The original manuscript, a scroll written in a three-week blast in 1951, is legendary: composed of approximately 120 feet (37 metres) of paper taped together and fed into a manual typewriter, the scroll allowed Kerouac the fast pace he was hoping to achieve. He also hoped to publish the novel as a scroll so that the reader would not be encumbered by having to turn the pages of a book. Rejected for publication at first, it finally was printed as a book in 1957. In the interim, Kerouac wrote several more “true-life” novels, Doctor Sax (1959), Maggie Cassidy (1959), and Tristessa (1960) among them.
Kerouac found himself a national sensation after On the Road received a rave review from The New York Times critic Gilbert Millstein. While Millstein extolled the literary merits of the book, to the American public the novel represented a departure from tradition. Kerouac, though, was disappointed with having achieved fame for what he considered the wrong reason: little attention went to the excellence of his writing and more to the novel’s radically different characters and its characterization of hipsters and their nonconformist celebration of sex, jazz, and endless movement. The character Dean Moriarty (based on Neal Cassady, another important influence on Kerouac’s style) was an American archetype, embodying “IT,” an intense moment of heightened experience achieved through fast driving, talking, or “blowing” (as a horn player might) or in writing. In On the Road Sal Paradise explains his fascination with others who have “IT,” such as Dean Moriarty and Rollo Greb as well as jazz performers: “The only ones for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.” These are characters for whom the perpetual now is all.
Readers often confused Kerouac with Sal Paradise, the amoral hipster at the centre of his novel. The critic Norman Podhoretz famously wrote that Beat writing was an assault against the intellect and against decency. This misreading dominated negative reactions to On the Road. Kerouac’s rebellion, however, is better understood as a quest for the solidity of home and family, what he considered “the hearthside ideal.” He wanted to achieve in his writing that which he could find neither in the promise of America nor in the empty spirituality of Roman Catholicism; he strived instead for the serenity that he had discovered in his adopted Buddhism. Kerouac felt that the Beat label marginalized him and prevented him from being treated as he wanted to be treated, as a man of letters in the American tradition of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.
Sketching, poetry, and Buddhism
Despite the success of the “spontaneous prose” technique Kerouac used in On the Road, he sought further refinements to his narrative style. Following a suggestion by Ed White, a friend from his Columbia University days, that he sketch “like a painter, but with words,” Kerouac sought visual possibilities in language by combining spontaneous prose with sketching. Visions of Cody (written in 1951–52 and published posthumously in 1972), an in-depth, more poetic variation of On the Road describing a buddy trip and including transcripts of his conversation with Cassady (now fictionalized as Cody), was the most successful realization of the sketching technique.
As he continued to experiment with his prose style, Kerouac also bolstered his standing among the Beat writers as a poet supreme. With his sonnets and odes he ranged across Western poetic traditions. He also experimented with the idioms of blues and jazz in such works as Mexico City Blues (1959), a sequential poem comprising 242 choruses. After he met the poet Gary Snyder in 1955, Kerouac’s poetry, as well as that of Ginsberg and fellow Beats Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, began to show the influence of the haiku, a genre mostly unknown to Americans at that time. (The haiku of Bashō, Buson, Masaoka Shiki, and Issa had not been translated into English until the pioneering work of R.H. Blyth in the late 1940s.) While Ezra Pound had modeled his poem “In a Station of the Metro” (1913) after Japanese haiku, Kerouac, departing from the 17-syllable, 3-line strictures, redefined the form and created an American haiku tradition. In the posthumously published collection Scattered Poems (1971), he proposed that the “Western haiku” simply say a lot in three short lines:
Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.
In his pocket notebooks, Kerouac wrote and rewrote haiku, revising and perfecting them. He also incorporated his haiku into his prose. His mastery of the form is demonstrated in his novel The Dharma Bums (1958).
Kerouac turned to Buddhist study and practice from 1953 to 1956, after his “road” period and in the lull between composing On the Road in 1951 and its publication in 1957. In the fall of 1953 he finished The Subterraneans (it would be published in 1958). Fed up with the world after the failed love affair upon which the book was based, he read Henry David Thoreau and fantasized a life outside civilization. He immersed himself in the study of Zen, and he became acquainted with the writings of American Buddhist popularizer Dwight Goddard, particularly the second edition (1938) of his A Buddhist Bible. Kerouac began his genre-defying Some of the Dharma in 1953 as reader’s notes on A Buddhist Bible, and the work grew into a massive compilation of spiritual material, meditations, prayers, haiku, and musings on the teaching of Buddha. In an attempt to replicate the experience of Han Shan, a reclusive Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty (618–907), Kerouac spent 63 days atop Desolation Peak in Washington state. Kerouac recounted this experience in Desolation Angels (1965) using haiku as bridges (connectives in jazz) between sections of spontaneous prose. In 1956 he wrote a sutra, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. He also began to think of his entire oeuvre as a “Divine Comedy of the Buddha,” thereby combining Eastern and Western traditions.
Later work
By the 1960s Kerouac had finished most of the writing for which he is best known. In 1961 he wrote Big Sur in 10 days while living in the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fellow Beat poet, in California’s Big Sur region. Two years later Kerouac’s account of his brother’s death was published as the spiritual Visions of Gerard. Another important autobiographical book, Vanity of Duluoz (1968), recounts stories of his childhood, his schooling, and the dramatic scandals that defined early Beat legend.
In 1969 Kerouac was broke, and many of his books were out of print. An alcoholic, he was living with his third wife and his mother in St. Petersburg, Florida. He spent his time at the Beaux Arts coffeehouse in nearby Pinellas Park and in local bars, such as the Wild Boar in Tampa. A week after he was beaten by fellow drinkers whom he had antagonized at the Cactus Bar in St. Petersburg, he died of internal hemorrhaging in front of his television while watching The Galloping Gourmet—the ultimate ending for a writer who came to be known as the “martyred king of the Beats.”
Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems (2012) gathered all of his published poetry collections along with poems that appeared in his fiction and elsewhere. The volume also contained six previously unpublished poems.
Legacy of Jack Kerouac
Kerouac’s insistence upon “First thought, best thought” and his refusal to revise was controversial. He felt that revision was a form of literary lying, imposing a form farther away from the truth of the moment, counter to his intentions for his “true-life” novels. For the composition of haiku, however, Kerouac was more exacting. Yet he accomplished the task of revision by rewriting. Hence, there exist several variations of On the Road, the final one being the 1957 version that was a culmination of Kerouac’s own revisions as well as the editing of his publisher. Significantly, Kerouac never saw the final manuscript before publication. Still, many critics found the long sweeping sentences of On the Road ragged and grammatically derelict.
Kerouac explained his quest for pure, unadulterated language—the truth of the heart unobstructed by the lying of revision—in two essays published in the Evergreen Review: “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1958) and “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose” (1959). On the grammatically irreverent sentences, Kerouac extolled a “method” eschewing conventional punctuation in favour of dashes. In “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” he recommended the “vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)”; the dash allowed Kerouac to deal with time differently, making it less prosaic and linear and more poetic. He also described his manner of developing an image, which began with the “jewel center,” from which he wrote in a “semi-trance,” “without consciousness,” his language governed by sound, by the poetic effect of alliteration and assonance, until he reached a plateau. A new “jewel center” would be initiated, stronger than the first, and would spiral out as he riffed (in an analogy with a jazz musician). He saw himself as a horn player blowing one long note, as he told interviewers for The Paris Review. His technique explains the unusual organization of his writing, which is not haphazard or sloppy but systematic in the most-individualized sense. In fact, Kerouac revised On the Road numerous times by recasting his story in book after book of The Legend of Duluoz. His “spontaneity” allowed him to develop his distinct voice.
Selected Poems by JACK KEROUAC
Bowery Blues
by JACK KEROUAC
The story of man
Makes me sick
Inside, outside,
I don't know why
Something so conditional
And all talk
Should hurt me so.
I am hurt
I am scared
I want to live
I want to die
I don't know
Where to turn
In the Void
And when
To cut
Out
For no Church told me
No Guru holds me
No advice
Just stone
Of New York
And on the cafeteria
We hear
The saxophone
O dead Ruby
Died of Shot
In Thirty Two,
Sounding like old times
And de bombed
Empty decapitated
Murder by the clock.
And I see Shadows
Dancing into Doom
In love, holding
TIght the lovely asses
Of the little girls
In love with sex
Showing themselves
In white undergarments
At elevated windows
Hoping for the Worst.
I can't take it
Anymore
If I can't hold
My little behind
To me in my room
Then it's goodbye
Sangsara
For me
Besides
Girls aren't as good
As they look
And Samadhi
Is better
Than you think
When it starts in
Hitting your head
In with Buzz
Of glittergold
Heaven's Angels
Wailing
Saying
We've been waiting for you
Since Morning, Jack
Why were you so long
Dallying in the sooty room?
This transcendental Brilliance
Is the better part
(of Nothingness
I sing)
Okay.
Quit.
Mad.
Stop.Trees
by JACK KEROUAC
But a tree has
a long suffering shapeIs
spread in half
by 2 limbed fate
Rises from gray rain
pavements
To traffic in the bleak
brown air
Of cities radar television
nameless dumb &numb mis connicumb
Throwing twigs the
color of ink To white souled
heaven, with
A reality of its own usesBus East
by JACK KEROUAC
Society has good intentions Bureaucracy is like a friend
5 years ago - other furies other losses -
America's
trying to control the uncontrollable Forest fires, Vice
The essential smile In the essential sleep Of the children Of the essential mind
I'm
all thru playing the American
Now I'm going to live a good quiet life
The
world should be built for foot walkers
Oily
rivers Of spiney Nevady
I
am Jake Cake
Rake
Write like Blake
The
horse is not pleased Sight of his
gorgeous finery
in the dust Its silken
nostrils
did disgust
Cats
arent kind Kiddies arent sweet
April
in Nevada - Investigating Dismal CheyenneWhere the war parties
In fields of straw
Aimed over oxen At Indian Chiefs
In wild headdress Pouring thru the gap
In Wyoming plain
To make the settlers
Eat more dust than dust
was eaten In the StatesFrom East at Seacoast Where wagons made up To dreadful
Plains
Of clazer vup
Saltry
settlers
Anxious to masturbate The Mongol Sea (I'm too tired in Cheyenne -
No sleep in 4 nights now, & 2 to go)How To Meditate
by JACK KEROUAC
-lights out-
fall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous
ecstasy like a shot of heroin or morphine,
the gland inside of my brain discharging
the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) as
i hap-down and hold all my body parts
down to a deadstop trance-Healing
all my sicknesses-erasing all-not
even the shred of a 'I-hope-you' or a
Loony Balloon left in it, but the mind
blank, serene, thoughtless. When a thought
comes a-springing from afar with its held-
forth figure of image, you spoof it out,
you spuff it off, you fake it, and
it fades, and thought never comes-and
with joy you realize for the first time
'thinking's just like not thinking-
So I don't have to think
any
more'On Tears
by JACK KEROUAC
Tears is the break of my brow,
The moony tempestuous
Sitting downIn dark railyards
When to see my mother’s face
Recalling from the waking vision
I wept to understand
The trap mortality
And personal blood of earth
Which saw me in—Father father
Why hast thou forsaken me?
Mortality & unpleasure
Roam this city—
Unhappiness my middle name
I want to be saved,-
Sunk—can’t be
Won’t be
Never was made—
So retch!Daydreams For Ginsberg
by JACK KEROUAC
I lie on my back at midnight
hearing the marvelous strange chime
of the clocks, and know it's mid-
night and in that instant the whole
world swims into sight for me
in the form of beautiful swarm-
ing m u t t a worlds-
everything is happening, shining
Buhudda-lands,
bhuti
blazing in faith, I know I'm
forever right & all's I got to
do (as I hear the ordinary
extant voices of ladies talking
in some kitchen at midnight
oilcloth cups of cocoa
cardore to mump the
rinnegain in his
darlin drain-) i will write
it, all the talk of the world
everywhere in this morning, leav-
ing open parentheses sections
for my own accompanying inner
thoughts-with roars of me
all brain-all world
roaring-vibrating-I put
it down, swiftly, 1,000 words
(of pages) compressed into one second
of time-I'll be long
robed & long gold haired in
the famous Greek afternoon
of some Greek City
Fame Immortal & they'll
have to find me where they find
the t h n u p f t of my
shroud bags flying
flag yagging Lucien
Midnight back in their
mouths-Gore Vidal'll
be amazed, annoyed-
my words'll be writ in gold
& preserved in libraries like
Finnegans Wake & Visions of NealCourage
by JACK KEROUAC
Wonder if my poem title will be acceptable.
(The Absence of Courage)
I.
Courage is an interesting virtue.
The only difference between courage
and unrealistic hopefulness is success.
Courage to me means standing up against injustice,
or atleast finding the strength to do something
your character or the outside world would rather you didn't do.
It's that noble buck with big horns we admire and have the deepest
of respect for,
it's that noble buck with big horns we like to shoot down and hang on our
walls.
Like the tobacco in a cigarette, the only way to draw it out
from the depths of your character is to embrace it and set it on fire.
But don't take more than you can handle,
or you might find yourself coughing up the illogical notion,
the practicality of your subconscious triumphing.
Bite off just enough,
enough to sustain hope, but not enough to defeat the
cowardice in your soul to the point where you altogether snuff restraint
and self doubt.
II.
I have seen courage in a number of places,
in the sun for it's miraculous overpowering of darkness every morning,
in a woman who decides to have a child despite life threatening consequences.
I've seen it mainly in action movies,
where it exists without the natural predators of insecurity and sensibility
found in the real world.
I've seen it in the insurrection of children who decide to just say yes,
I've seen it in the cynical gaze of withered old addicts who are trying to
say no.
Courage, it's a wonderful thing.
It's both a blessing and a curse.
Embrace it and harness it,
but do it in moderation,
or it might get the better of your self-doubt and sensibility.Peace of Mind
by JACK KEROUAC
While rollerblading hurriedly through peaceful quiet suburbia,
as is my habit in the prime of spring,
I came to realize what I was made for.
On similar spring skates from years past,
I would think of how much I love suburban innocence and tranquility,
and eventually how I once loved suburban innocence and tranquility.
This April 23, however was filled not with joyful rememberance,
but with hope and curiousity about what sort of peace of mind I can obtain.
I'm tired of quiet decomposition and pretended indifference.
Constant hate and dislike.
The time has come to embrace the finer things,
to appreciate the warmth of security and smiles.
The sprinkler does it's whirrrrr, tick-tick-tick-tick.
Jesus, they should make pie flavors with pictures of this on the cover.
I slowed down, enchanted by the artificialy lovely neighborhood.
Skated on past bar-b-que on front lawn of a pretty house.
Men with polo shirts look up from their beer and smile pleasantly.
Moms look over with concern to see that their happiness isn't run over by unruly teenagers.
Boys on 13 inch tired bikes that read 'mud slinger' and 'power rangers' pedal galantly after me.
Girls around 13 smile inocently and wonder if they know my little brother.
The climate's ideal, and so are the people.
Reached a dead end of sorts that looked quiet enough to sit down and give my feet some rest.
7 year old with dark skin pedals thoughtfuly down his drive way.
The Bar-B-que is taking place only a couple of yards away.
He looks over at me with a lonely questioning look,
and as I skate back the way I came, I wonder why he isn't involved in the charred animal flesh consumption.
It could be his skin color, but that seems too petty for such a pleasant place.
Perhaps it's his parent's religious views, their funny accent, or more likely an overwhelming sense of isolation.
It seems that there must be some sort of 'just think pleasant thoughts' conspiracy around here and the standards are slow to change.
As I skate by once more, I look long and hard at the happy suburbanites.
They still looked really content and warm, but I noticed not one of them was anything but white.
What does it matter, I'm white, anyways.1st Chorus Mexico City Blues
by JACK KEROUAC
Butte Magic of Ignorance
Butte Magic
Is the same as no-Butte
All one light
Old Rough Roads
One High Iron
Mainway
Denver is the same
"The guy I was with his uncle was
the govornor of Wyoming"
"Course he paid me back"
Ten Days
Two Weeks
Stock and Joint
"Was an old crook anyway"
The same voice on the same ship
The Supreme Vehicle
S.S. Excalibur
Maynard
Mainline
Mountain
Merudvhaga
Mersion of MissyHow To Meditate
by JACK KEROUAC
-ligts out-
fall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous
ecstasy like a shot of heroin or morphine,
the gland inside of my brain discharging
the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) as
i hap-down and hold all my body parts
down to a deadstop trance-Healing
all my sicknesses-erasing all-not
even the shred of a "I-hope-you" or a
Loony Balloon left in it, but the mind
blank, serene, thoughtless. When a thought
comes a-springing from afar with its held-
forth figure of image, you spoof it out,
you spuff it off, you fake it, and
it fades, and thought never comes-and
with joy you realize for the first time
"Thinking's just like not thinking-
So I don't have to think
any
more"Walking Through Roxbury
by JACK KEROUAC
I took a stroll through Roxbury,
enlightenment was obtained, in a meaningless poetic sense.
Homeless men's faces shout such agony,
they evoke images of tortured souls in a science fiction movie.
Concrete all perfectly disorganized,
like a tile floor at a government building smashed repeatedly by a disgruntled employee.
Cars rush by like ants in their endless toil,
sky leaks darkness upon artificial attempts to beat nature.
Trash lines the street like flaws litter my character.
Trash trucks come and collect these flaws,
take them out of view, so it doesn't look dirty.
But although this takes it out of public concern,
the trash has to be taken somewhere.
You can't just will the trash out of existence,
it has to be allowed to fester and decompose.
That's why the trucks thake the trash off some forgotten highway,
to let it do it's time removed from first impressions.
So God bless those trash trucks,
because with out them, there would still be the same amount of trash,
but people would be constantly reminded of what a trashy place this is.Nebraska
by JACK KEROUAC
April doesnt hurt here
Like it does in New England
The ground
Vast and brown
Surrounds dry towns
Located in the dust
Of the coming locust
Live for survival, not for "kicks"
Be a bangtail describer,
like of shrouded traveler
in Textile tenement & the birds fighting in yr ears-like Burroughs exact to describe & gettin $
The Angry Hunger
(hunger is anger)
who fears the
hungry feareth
the angry)
And so I came home
To Golden far away
Twas on the horizon
Every blessed day
As we rolled And we rolled
From Donner tragic Pass
Thru April in Nevada And out Salt City Way Into the dry Nebraskas And sad Wyomings Where young girls And pretty lover boys
With Mickey Mantle eyes
Wander under moons
Sawing in lost cradle
And Judge O Fasterc
Passes whiggling by To ask of young love: ,,Was it the same wind Of April Plains eve that ruffled the dress
Of my lost love
Louanna
In the Western
Far off night
Lost as the whistle
Of the passing Train
Everywhere West
Roams moaning
The deep basso
- Vom! Vom!
- Was it the same love
Notified my bones As mortify yrs now
Children of the soft
Wyoming April night?
Couldna been!
But was! But was!"
And on the prairie
The wildflower blows
In the night For bees & birds And sleeping hidden Animals of life.
The Chicago
Spitters in the spotty street
Cheap beans, loop, Girls made eyes at me And I had 35 Cents in my jeans -
Then Toledo
Springtime starry
Lover night Of hot rod boys And cool girls A wandering
A wandering
In search of April pain A plash of rain
Will not dispel This fumigatin hell Of lover lane This park of roses Blue as bees
In former airy poses
In aerial O Way hoses
No tamarand And figancine Can the musterand Be less kind
Sol -
Sol -
Bring forth yr Ah Sunflower - Ah me Montana
Phosphorescent Rose
And bridge in
fairly land
I'd understand it all -Mexico City Blues [113th Chorus]
by JACK KEROUAC
Got up and dressed up and went out & got laid Then died and got buried in a coffin in the grave, Man— Yet everything is perfect, Because it is empty, Because it is perfect with emptiness, Because it's not even happening. Everything Is Ignorant of its own emptiness— Anger Doesn't like to be reminded of fits— You start with the Teaching Inscrutable of the Diamond And end with it, your goal is your startingplace, No race was run, no walk of prophetic toenails Across Arabies of hot meaning—you just numbly don't get there