Jack Kerouac’s Biography, ‘On the Road with Jack.”
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live… [who] burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…” (On the Road).
Even fifty plus years after the publication of his monumental novel, On the Road, Jack Kerouac is still the “holy” leader of the great “beat” generation band. He represents a time when America was free and innocent and the bebop band played all night while hipsters chugged cheap California wine.
The beat generation begins
Kerouac was born to immigrant Québécois parents on March 12, 1922. Both his parents were staunch Catholics and young Jack was raised in the French-Canadian tongue; he didn’t speak English until he was nearly six years old. Trauma hit the house early as Jack’s nine-year-old brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever when Jack was four. The novel, Visions of Gerard (1963), chronicles the younger sibling’s remembrances. And then another tragedy as financial difficulties hit the family and Jack’s father fell into alcoholism.
Jack won a football scholarship to Columbia University in 1939. It didn’t last long because he dropped out, but his time in New York is significant; here he met Alan Ginsberg (Carlo Marx - On the Road), William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee – On the Road) and the energetic Neal Cassidy (Dean Moriarty - On the Road).
Mad travels across America
In 1950, Kerouac published, The Town and the City, a stylistically dreary first novel. However, during the early fifties Kerouac began his crisscross travels across America, filling up notebooks about his “mad” experiences, but it would be six years before On the Road was published. Unlike his first novel, On the Road would take on a unique style with a lyrical, spontaneous, jazz inspired prose. Visions of Cody (1960) also deals with his hysterical travels across America from 1951-1952.
From 1955-6 Kerouac was in San Francisco, hooking up with the Zen poet Gary Snyder and digesting Buddhism. Dharma Bums (1958), is about his experiences with Snyder (Japhy Ryder) while mountain climbing in California.
With the publication of On the Road in 1957, Kerouac became an instant success, but he was incapable of dealing with his “movie star” status. The novel, lauded by popular culture, was scorned by contemporary literary critics, devastating Kerouac. He sunk into heavy drinking; his alcoholic destruction is chronicled in Big Sur, (1961).
Kerouac's last move was to Florida with his mother and third wife. Trying to live up to his free-living “beat” style, he immersed himself in cheap wine until his liver finally gave out and he died on October 21, 1969 and the very young age of 47.
Kerouac on the Screen (Big and Small)
The Tonight Show with Steve Allen, 1957 (you can find a copy on Youtube)
The Source, 1999 film ( Johnny Depp plays Jack)
American Writers – Jack Kerouac, 2-hour C-SPAN television show (available n-line)
Jack Kerouac’s Road – A Franco-American Odyssey, 1989 National Film Board of Canada
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