Jack Kerouac

• 1. Introduction

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  Jack Kerouac learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens, because the language of his Lowell, Massachusetts home was French. His parents, Leo and Gabrielle, were French Canadians, and around the house the boy was called Ti Jean, or little John. He would grow up to write On the Road, the book that made him a Beat icon in 1957 and earned him the title King of the Beats. He never felt comfortable with that crown. Once he told a reporter, plainly, "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic." Here was a man often misread by everyone who claimed him. The hippies took him as a forefather, and he despised them. The left scorned his anti-communism, the right scorned his drug use, and he watched the McCarthy hearings smoking marijuana while rooting for the senator. How did a devout, French-speaking athlete from a mill town become the voice of a generation he wanted no part of? What did he mean when he called his most famous novel a story about two Catholic buddies searching for God? And why did fame, when it finally came, become the thing he later called his undoing?

• 2. Sad Beaulieu

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  At 34 Beaulieu Street, a place Kerouac later called "sad Beaulieu," his family was living in 1926 when his older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever, aged nine. Four-year-old Jack was deeply affected. He later said Gerard followed him through life as a guardian angel, and he made his brother the subject of the novel Visions of Gerard. Gerard's death split the household along a fault line of faith. Gabrielle, a devout Catholic, sought solace in her religion and instilled deep belief in her sons. Leo went the other way, abandoning his faith and wallowing in drinking, gambling, and smoking. After the death, Leo even threw a priest out of the house, despite Gabrielle having invited him in. On the 17th of May 1928, while six years old, Kerouac made his first Confession. For penance he was told to say a rosary, during which he heard God tell him he had a good soul, that he would suffer in life and die in pain and horror, but in the end would receive salvation. That experience, joined to his dying brother's vision of the Virgin Mary, would shape the worldview behind everything he wrote.

• 3. The Wizard Of Ozone Park

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  Kerouac's skills as a running back for Lowell High School earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and Columbia University, where he enrolled in 1940. The football dream did not survive. He broke a leg during his freshman season, argued constantly with coach Lou Little, who kept him benched, and felt a growing tension between football and literature before quitting the team. When his football career ended, he dropped out of the university altogether. During World War II he served as a United States Merchant Mariner from July to October 1942, aboard the SS Dorchester before its maiden voyage. A few months later that ship was sunk in a submarine attack while crossing the Atlantic, and several of his former shipmates were lost. His turn in the United States Navy Reserves lasted eight days of active duty before he landed on the sick list. He told the medical examiner, "I just can't stand it; I like to be by myself," and was honorably discharged on psychiatric grounds with a diagnosis of schizoid personality. Living afterward with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, he wrote The Town and the City and began On the Road. His friends jokingly called him "The Wizard of Ozone Park," a nod to Thomas Edison's nickname, the Wizard of Menlo Park.

• 4. Material Witness

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  In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness in the murder of David Kammerer. Kammerer had allegedly been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. Carr said the obsession turned aggressive and that he stabbed Kammerer in self-defense, then dumped the body in the Hudson River. Afterward Carr came to Kerouac for help. Kerouac disposed of the murder weapon and buried Kammerer's eyeglasses. When Carr, encouraged by his mother, turned himself in, Kerouac and William Burroughs were arrested as witnesses. Kerouac's father refused to pay his bail. So Kerouac struck a bargain. He agreed to marry his girlfriend Edie Parker if her parents would pay it. They married on Tuesday the 22nd of August 1944, in the Municipal Building, with two detectives as witnesses, before he was returned to his cell in the Bronx City Prison. The marriage was annulled in 1948. It was through Carr, a fellow native of St. Louis like Burroughs, that Kerouac came to know both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac and Burroughs even collaborated on a novel about the killing, titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, an excerpt of which would appear decades later in a Burroughs reader.

• 5. The Scroll

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  In April 1951, living at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty, Kerouac completed what is now known as On the Road. To write without the interruption of reloading pages, he cut sheets of tracing paper into long strips, taped them into a roll 120 feet long, and fed it into his typewriter. He typed the final draft in 20 days, kept going by Joan, who supplied benzedrine, cigarettes, bowls of pea soup, and mugs of coffee. The resulting manuscript had no chapter or paragraph breaks and was far more explicit than what eventually reached print. The spontaneity was real but not unprepared. According to his Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, Kerouac had outlined much of the work in his journals over several preceding years. The book is largely autobiographical, describing road trips across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady. There is an irony at its center. Kerouac did not have a driver's license, and Cassady did most of the cross-country driving, while Kerouac learned to drive only at age 34. Decades later, the original scroll would be bought by Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay for 2.43 million dollars.

• 6. Two Catholic Buddies

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  On the Road, Kerouac insisted, "was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him." His biographer, the historian Douglas Brinkley, argued the novel had been widely misread as a tale of companions out looking for kicks. The key, Brinkley said, was that Kerouac was an American Catholic author, and that virtually every page of his diary bore a sketch of a crucifix, a prayer, or an appeal to Christ for forgiveness. In 1954, at the San Jose Library, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible, the start of his serious study of Buddhism. He wrote Some of the Dharma, an experimental treatise referencing figures such as Milarepa, Sariputa, and the Zen master Dogen. In 1955 he wrote a biography of the Buddha titled Wake Up, unpublished during his lifetime. The Diamond Sutra became his most important Buddhist text, which he studied in a repeating weekly cycle, one day for each of the six Paramitas. Yet faith and label never fully merged. After harsh criticism of The Dharma Bums, he wrote to Gary Snyder that even D. T. Suzuki had looked at him "through slitted eyes as though I was a monstrous imposter," and told Philip Whalen, "I'm not a Buddhist any more."

• 7. An Unmanageable Surge

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  In July 1957, Kerouac moved to a small house at 1418 and a half Clouser Avenue in the College Park section of Orlando, Florida, to await the release of On the Road. Weeks later a review by Gilbert Millstein appeared in The New York Times proclaiming him the voice of a new generation, and he was hailed as a major American writer. He had coined the term Beat Generation himself, during a conversation with Herbert Huncke, who had used "beat" to describe a person with little money and few prospects. The fame arrived as a surge he could not manage. After nine months he no longer felt safe in public. One night, outside the San Remo Cafe at 189 Bleecker Street in New York, three men badly beat him. Neal Cassady, now notorious as the book's central character, was set up and arrested for selling marijuana. Kerouac kept writing through it, producing The Dharma Bums in Orlando between the 26th of November and the 7th of December 1957, again typing onto a long roll, this time ten feet of teleprinter paper. He bought the first of three homes in Northport, New York, a wood-framed Victorian on Gilbert Street, and moved there with his mother Gabrielle in March 1958.

• 8. Bleeding Esophageal Varices

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  On the morning of the 20th of October 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kerouac was working on a book about his father's print shop when he felt nauseated and began to vomit blood. Taken to St. Anthony's Hospital with an esophageal hemorrhage, he received several transfusions, but a damaged liver kept his blood from clotting. He never regained consciousness after surgery and died at 5:15 the following morning, aged 47. The cause was internal hemorrhage from cirrhosis, the result of longtime alcohol abuse, with an untreated hernia from a recent bar fight as a possible factor. His funeral was held at St. Jean Baptiste Church in Lowell, and he was buried at Edson Cemetery. He died living with his third wife, Stella Sampas Kerouac, and his mother inherited most of his estate. The reach he disliked in life kept widening after it. Ray Manzarek of the Doors wrote, "I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed." In 2007 the University of Massachusetts Lowell awarded him a posthumous honorary Doctor of Letters, and in October 2015 a crater on the planet Mercury was named in his honor.