Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac - my whitness is the empty sky designed and maintained by [ SSR ]
LINKS: Kerouac speaks (listen) | Kerouac Family Association (bilingual) | kerouac.com (buy stuff) | American Authors (watch) Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. Jack, as he was later called, spoke no English until he was around six years old. At home, his family spoke a "colored" French language called Québécois French. Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac, Jack’s parents, were both descendants of French-Canadian immigrants who settled in New England. Life in Lowell during Jack’s childhood was not easy. While it had once been an important industrial town, businesses were on the decline and the Great Depression hit Lowell’s economy hard. Many families, including the Kerouacs, had trouble making ends meet. Gabrielle worked in factories off and on throughout Jack’s lifetime. Jack’s father worked as a newspaper reporter, eventually owning his own printing business until a devastating flood hit Lowell and he was forced to sell it. After this failure, Jack’s father turned to gambling and never regained financial success.
Leo and Gabrielle had two children older than Jack: Gerard, born in 1917 and Caroline (nicknamed Nin), born in 1920. Gerard’s health was fragile due to a heart condition. After months of suffering in 1926, Gerard succumbed to a rheumatic fever at only nine years old. Jack had loved and idolized his older brother, and at only four years old, could not understand Gerard’s death. It had a continual impact on Jack’s imagination and thoughts, and perhaps caused adults to perceive Jack as a quiet, brooding child.
From a very early age, Jack was very creative and artistic. He drew cartoon scripts and acted his own “silent movies” in the family’s parlor. Later in his childhood, Jack began to create his own magazines, in which he drew the pictures and wrote the texts. Although he was quiet, he had many friends and companions as a child. He was educated in French-speaking Catholic parochial schools until he reached junior high, when he began his first experience learning entirely in English at the public schools in Lowell. Once Jack learned English, he began to read everything he could get his hands on, from conventional novels to pulp mysteries.
In high school, Jack became a local football star. He was so talented as a halfback, in fact, that he won a scholarship to play for a college education at Columbia. Before entering the university, the scholarship provided that Jack take a year at Horace Mann, an academy in the Bronx, which enabled him to take some math and French classes before beginning college. Jack went to Columbia in 1940 to begin playing football, but broke his leg early in the season and was benched. After a disagreement with his coach the next fall, Jack quit football and Columbia and hit the road back to Lowell.
Jack landed a job as the sports reporter for the Lowell Sun, where he worked for several months. He decided that sports writing in Lowell was not for him, and moved briefly to Washington, D.C. then to Boston, working various temporary jobs in construction and food service. The United States was just entering into World War II, and Jack decided to join a ship as a sailor in the Merchant Marine in early 1942. The passage to Greenland and Nova Scotia on the S.S. Dorchester was quite difficult, and when Jack got home he returned briefly to Columbia. Jack then joined the Navy for a time, but was honorably discharged a few months later on psychological grounds. The authorities had thought he was insane because he did not submit to the authority of his military superiors and questioned him extensively before admitting him briefly to the psychiatric unit. He re-joined the Navy after being discharged and sailed to England and back on the S.S. George Weens.
When he returned from England, Jack and sometime girlfriend Edie Parker began to meet friends that would prove very influential and important in Jack’s life: Lucien Carr and the writer Allen Ginsberg, who were Columbia students at the time, the writer William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady, the companion to Jack’s legendary cross-country wanderings in his famous novel On the Road. This circle, along with a few other friends, became known as the center of the “Beat” movement. Jack and his friends were very interested in and influenced by the popular jazz and bop music of the time. Jack coined the phrase “Beat Generation” in a conversation with the writer John Clellon Holmes, when he described his contemporary generation as having an attitude of “beatness” or “weariness” with the world.
After some involvement as an accessory in an incident that left Lucien Carr in prison for manslaughter, Jack married Edie in 1944. The marriage only lasted a matter of months, however, and the couple divorced in 1945. Jack’s father Leo died later that same year of stomach cancer, and Jack began work on his first and most conventional novel, "The Town and the City," which was published in 1950.
In 1949, Jack took a road trip from the East Coast to San Francisco with Neal Cassady and his ex-wife Luanne. Jack would cross America and Mexico several times in the next decade, sometimes driving with Neal Cassady in a car, sometimes hitchhiking. These cross-country trips comprised much of the content for Jack’s most famous work, "On the Road."
The next year, Jack married his second wife, Joan Haverty. Joan became pregnant with a daughter, and the couple separated the next year. Jack wrote the original version of "On the Road" in 1951. The next few years were to be his most productive. He worked on "Visions of Cody" and "Dr. Sax" the next year while on trips to visit Neal Cassady in San Francisco and William Burroughs in Mexico City. He also wrote "Maggie Cassidy" in 1953 about Mary Carney, a girl he had been in love with as a teenager, in addition to "The Subterraneans." Although he was writing prolifically during this period, Jack had still not had a book published since "The Town and the City" in 1950.
Over the next few years, Jack traveled often, hitchhiking across America, visiting Cassady, Ginsberg and Burroughs at their residences in various parts of the country and taking occasional jobs. Jack became interested in Buddhism and went alone to Mexico in 1955 to meditate. There, he composed a body of poetry called "Mexico City Blues" and began a novel about a woman he met there called "Tristessa." In early 1956, he began working on other novels: "Visions of Gerard," about his older brother’s death, "The Scripture of the Golden Eternity" and "Old Angel Midnight."
After years of delays and revisions, "On the Road" was finally published in 1957 and Jack began to taste fame. The book began to enjoy tremendous success, and Jack appeared in Mademoiselle magazine, among others. Ginsberg and some of the other famous Beats were already well known writers and performers, and Jack’s new book made a splash on the scene they already inhabited. After a brief respite to Tangier with Ginsberg and Burroughs, and a trip to London just after "On the Road" was published, Jack returned to New York a celebrity. Jack had become the representative of the Beat generation, to his chagrin. Fans lauded him and critics derided him as an advocate for the excesses and world-weariness of the Beat generation.
As a follow up to "On the Road," Jack wrote his last novel for four years to follow, "The Dharma Bums." More of Jack’s previous works were being published, including "The Subterraneans," "Dr. Sax," "Mexico City Blues" and "Tristessa." Joining his Beat friends, Jack began to do poetry and prose readings at clubs in New York, accompanied by jazz musicians such as Steve Allen, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn and David Amram. He often wrote columns for magazines such as Playboy, Swank, Holiday, Escapade and Esquire.
The much-awaited years of fame were not happy for Jack. He had battled problems with alcoholism, which had worsened with his increasing fame. Jack was unhappy in his newfound celebrity status, as the critics denounced him for his unique “spontaneous prose” form of writing as well as for being a proponent of a lifestyle that he did not necessarily advocate.
Jack moved to Bixby Canyon in Big Sur, California in 1961 and wrote his final novel, the dark, semi-autobiographical "Big Sur." In the last years of his life, Jack lived with his mother. He had remained a dedicated and caring son and lived with her periodically throughout his adult life as she moved to different locations in New York and Florida. He married childhood friend Stella Sampas in 1966, and the couple moved to St. Petersburg with Gabrielle. Jack’s fame dwindled toward the end of his life, and alcoholism had deteriorated his health considerably. On October 20, 1969, Jack died from internal bleeding caused by cirrhosis of the liver. He was only 47 years old. Stella and Gabrielle held a small wake in St. Petersburg, Florida, and another wake in Lowell. His funeral was held at the St. Jean Baptiste Church in Lowell that Jack had attended as a little boy, and he was laid to rest in the Sampas family plot in Lowell’s Edson Cemetery.
"On the Road" and Jack’s other novels have made a significant impact on American literature. His “spontaneous prose” told tales of the Beat generation, making him the talented and reluctant spokesman for the hip youth of the 1950s.
Jack Kerouac was an altar boy at St. Jean Baptiste Cathedral in 1932.
Kerouac entered Lowell's Bartlett Junior High School in 1933 (after skipping sixth grade) and became a member of the writer’s club. He even began writing a novel, “Jack Kerouac Explores the Merrimack."
In high school, Kerouac excelled at baseball, track and football. In fact it was not long after his star performance in Lowell High's 1938 Thanksgiving Day game that he received a scholarship to Columbia University.
Kerouac enrolled in Columbia in September 1940 after spending a year at the Horace Mann preparatory school in New York City.
It is said that Kerouac, after over-indulging one night, enlisted in the Army, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard all on the same day following the start of WWII.
Kerouac applied to the U.S. Forest Service for a fire lookout job in Mt. Baker National Forest. He was hired for the 1956 summer to man Desolation Lookout, a remote station in what is now North Cascades National Park, just south of the Canadian border. The radio voices of fellow fire watchers were his only human contact during the 63 days he spent on the peak.
Desolation Lookout provided a great deal of inspiration for future literary works, contributing to the spiritual climax in “The Dharma Bums,” an essay in “Lonesome Traveler” and numerous poetic choruses in the “Book of Blues” (published posthumously).
Kerouac narrated the 1959 film "Pull My Daisy" improvising to music as he had done in numerous poetry readings in the past. Believing in spontaneity, he narrated as he went making it up on the spot, and was done in two readings. He refused to do more.
He is remembered in the 10,000 Maniacs song "Hey Jack Kerouac."
An annual festival is held in Lowell, Massachusetts the first weekend in October celebrating Kerouac and his life in Lowell. Some of the events include; readings, book signings, live music, panel discussions, open mike events and tours of sites described in (his) Lowell-based novels.
Kerouac is credited with originating the term “Beat Generation” which took on associations of the word ‘beat’ meaning “poor, weary or down and out.” Connections were made later to jazz music and terms like, “swing, cool, hip and crazy” became part of the association. Generally, it is thought that the ‘beats’ valued freedom of artistic and personal expression, rebelling against the conformity associated with the 1950s. FULL BIOGRAPHY Family and childhood
Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, in Lowell, Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kerouac and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque, natives of the province of Québec, Canada. Like many other Quebecers of their generation, the Lévesques and Kerouacs were part of the Quebec emigration to New England to find employment.
Kerouac often gave conflicting stories about his family history and the origins of his surname. Though his father was born to a family of potato farmers in the village of St.Hubert, he often claimed aristocratic descent, sometimes from a Breton noble granted land after the Battle of Quebec, whose sons all married Native Americans. However, research has shown him to be the descendant of a middle-class merchant settler, whose sons married French Canadians. He was part Native American, however, though through his mother's largely Norman-side of the family. He also had various stories on the etymology of his surname, usually tracing in back to Irish, Breton, or other Celtic roots. In one interview he claimed it was the name of a dead Celtic language and in another said it was from the Irish for "language of the water" and related to "Kerwick".[2] The name, though Breton, seems to derive from the name of one of several hamlets in Brittany near Rosporden.
Kerouac did not start to learn English until the age of six, and at home, he and his family spoke joual, a Quebec French dialect.[4][5] When he was four he was profoundly affected by the death of his nine-year-old brother, Gérard, from rheumatic fever, an event later described in his novel Visions of Gerard. Some of Kerouac's poetry was written in French, and in letters written to friend Allen Ginsberg towards the end of his life he expressed his desire to speak his parents' native tongue again. Recently, it was discovered that Kerouac first started writing On the Road in French, a language in which he also wrote two unpublished novels.[6] The writings are in dialectal Quebec French, and predate the first novels of Michel Tremblay by a decade.
Kerouac's athletic prowess led him to become a 100-meter hurdler on his local high school track team, and his skills as a running back in American football earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame and Columbia University. He entered Columbia University after spending a year at Horace Mann School, where he earned the requisite grades to matriculate to Columbia. Kerouac broke a leg playing football during his freshman season, and he argued constantly with coach Lou Little who kept him benched. While at Columbia, Kerouac wrote several sports articles for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator.

Jack Kerouac lived above this flower shop in Ozone Park.
Early adulthood
When his football scholarship did not pan out, Kerouac dropped out of Columbia, though he continued to live for a period on New York City's Upper West Side with his girlfriend, Edie Parker. It was during this time that he met the people with whom he was later to journey around the world, the subjects of many of his novels: the so-called Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke and William S. Burroughs. Kerouac joined the United States Merchant Marine in 1942 and in 1943 joined the United States Navy, but was honorably discharged during World War II on psychiatric grounds (he was of "indifferent disposition").
In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as an accessory in the murder of David Kammerer, who'd been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. (William Burroughs was himself a native of St. Louis, and it was through Carr that Kerouac came to know both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.) When Kammerer's obsession with Carr turned violent, Carr stabbed him to death and turned to Kerouac for help. Together, they disposed of evidence. As advised by Burroughs, they turned themselves in. Kerouac's father at first refused to pay his bail. Kerouac then agreed to marry Edie Parker if she'd pay it. Their marriage was annulled a year later, and Kerouac and Burroughs briefly collaborated on a novel about the Kammerer killing entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Though the book was not published during the lifetimes of either Kerouac or Burroughs, an excerpt eventually appeared in Word Virus: A William S. Burroughs Reader (and as noted below, the book is now scheduled for publication in late 2008). Kerouac also later wrote about the killing in his novel Vanity of Duluoz.
Later, he lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they, too, moved to New York. He wrote his first novel, The Town and the City, and, according to at least John Clellon Holmes, began the quintessential On the Road around 1949 while living there. His friends jokingly called him "The Wizard of Ozone Park," a spoof of Thomas Edison's "Wizard of Menlo Park" nickname while simultaneously alluding to the title character of the film The Wizard of Oz and a shortened form of the word "ozone".
Beginning of the original typed roll where Kerouac wrote On the Road. The first sentence is: "I first met met Neal not long after my father died..." Later it would be replaced by the definitive one: "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up".
Early career 1950-1957
Kerouac tended to write constantly, carrying a notebook with him everywhere. Letters to friends and family members tended to be long and rambling, including great detail about his daily life and thoughts. Prior to becoming a writer, he tried a varied list of careers. He was a sports reporter for The Lowell Sun; a temporary worker in construction and food service; a United States Merchant Marine and he joined the United States Navy twice.
The Town and the City was published in 1950 under the name "John Kerouac," and, though it earned him a few respectable reviews, the book sold poorly. Heavily influenced by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe, it reflects on the generational epic formula and the contrasts of small town life versus the multi-dimensional, and larger, city. The book was heavily edited by Robert Giroux; some 400 pages were taken out.
For the next six years, Kerouac wrote constantly. 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 of 1951 while living at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty.[9] The book was largely autobiographical and describes Kerouac's road-trip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady in the late-40's, as well his relationships with other Beat writers and friends. Fueled by coffee and Benzedrine, he completed the first version of the novel during a three week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paper [10]into long strips, wide enough for a type-writer, and taped them together into a 120-foot long roll he then fed into the machine. This allowed him to type continuously without the interruption of reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or paragraph breaks and was much more explicit then what would eventually be printed. Though "spontaneous", Kerouac had prepared long in advance before beginning to write.[11] In fact, according to his Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the work in his journals over the several preceding years.
Though completed quickly, Kerouac had a long and difficult time finding a buyer for his work. Publishers rejected the manuscript due to its experimental writing style and its sympathetic tone towards minorities and marginalized social groups of post-War America. Many editors were also uncomfortable with the idea of publishing a book that contained, what was for the time, graphic descriptions of drug-use and homosexual behavior, a move that could result in obscenity charges being filed, a fate that later befell Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Ginsberg's Howl.
In late 1951, Joan Haverty left and divorced Kerouac while pregnant. In February of 1952, she gave birth to Kerouac's only child Jan Kerouac, though he refused to acknowledge her as his own until a blood test confirmed it 9 years later.[12] For the next several years Kerouac continued writing and traveling, taking extensive trips though out the U.S. and Mexico and often fell into bouts of depression and heavy drug and alcohol use. During this period he finished drafts for what would become 10 more novels, including The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Tristessa, and Desolation Angles, which chronicle many of the events of these years.
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. In 1955 Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, entitled Wake Up, which was unpublished during his lifetime but eventually serialised in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993-95.
House in Orlando, Florida where Kerouac lived and wrote The Dharma Bums
In 1957, after being rejected by several other firms, On the Road was finally purchased by Viking Press, which demanded major revisions prior to publication. Many of the more sexually explicit passages were removed and, fearing libel suits, pseudonyms were used for the books "characters." These revisions have often led to criticisms as to the actual spontaneity of Kerouac's style.
Later career 1957-1969
In July 1957, Kerouac moved to a small house on Clouser Ave. in the College Park section of Orlando, Florida to await the release of On the Road. A few weeks later, the review appeared in the New York Times proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation. Kerouac was hailed as a major American writer. His friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among others, became a notorious representation of the Beat Generation. His fame would come as an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing. Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the post-World War II Beat Generation and Kerouac came to be called "the king of the beat generation," a term that he never felt comfortable with. He once observed, "I'm not a beatnik, I'm a Catholic."
The immediate success of On the Road brought Kerouac instant fame. He soon found he had little taste for celebrity status. After nine months, he no longer felt safe in public. He was badly beaten by three men outside the San Remo Bar in New York one night. Neal Cassady, possibly as a result of his new notoriety as the central character of the book, was set up and arrested for selling pot.
Publishers were eager for a quick "sequel" to capitalize on On the Road's success. In response, Kerouac chronicled parts of his own experience with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco-area poets, in The Dharma Bums, set in California and Washington and published in 1958. It was written in Orlando, Florida between November 26[15] and December 7, 1957. To begin writing Dharma Bums, Kerouac typed onto a ten-foot length of teletype paper, to avoid interrupting his flow for paper changes, as he had done six years previously for On the Road.[15] Kerouac was demoralized by criticism of Dharma Bums from such respected figures in the American field of Buddhism as Zen teacher Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Alan Watts. He wrote to Snyder, referring to a meeting with D. T. Suzuki, that "even Suzuki was looking at me through slitted eyes as tho I was a monstrous imposter". He passed up the opportunity to reunite with Snyder in California, and explained to Whalen, "I'd be ashamed to confront you and Gary now I've become so decadent and drunk and dontgiveashit. I'm not a Buddhist any more."
Kerouac also wrote and narrated a "Beat" movie entitled Pull My Daisy in 1959. Originally to be called "The Beat Generation", the title was change at the last moment when MGM released a film by the same name, sensationalized "beatnik" culture. John Antonelli's 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie begins and ends with footage of Kerouac reading from On the Road and Visions of Cody on The Tonight Show with Steve Allen in 1957. Kerouac appears intelligent but shy. "Are you nervous?" asks Steve Allen. "Naw", says Kerouac, sweating and fiddling.
Kerouac developed something of a friendship with the scholar Alan Watts (cryptically named Arthur Wayne in Kerouac's novel Big Sur, and Alex Aums in Desolation Angels). Kerouac moved to Northport, New York in March 1958, six months after releasing On the Road, to care for his aging mother Gabrielle and to hide from his new-found celebrity.
Death
Kerouac died on October 21, 1969 at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, one day after being rushed with severe abdominal pain from his St. Petersburg home by ambulance.
Gravesite, Lowell Massachusetts
His death, at the age of 47, resulted from an internal haemorrhage (bleeding esophageal varices) caused by cirrhosis of the liver, the result of a lifetime of heavy drinking.[18] At the time of his death, he was living with his third wife Stella, and his mother Gabrielle. Kerouac is buried in his home town of Lowell and was honored posthumously with a Doctor of Letters degree from his hometown's University of Massachusetts - Lowell on June 2, 2007.
In 2007, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publishing, Viking issued two new editions: On the Road: The Original Scroll, and On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition. By far the more significant is Scroll, a transcription of the original draft typed as one long paragraph on sheets of tracing paper which Kerouac taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. The text is more sexually explicit than Viking allowed to be published in 1957, and also uses the real names of Kerouac's friends rather than the fictional names he later substituted. (Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay paid $2.43 million for the original scroll and is allowing an exhibition tour that will conclude at the end of 2009.) The other new issue, 50th Anniversary Edition, is a reissue of the 40th anniversary issue under an updated title.
In March 2008, Penguin Books announced that the Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks will be published for the first time in November 2008. Previously, a fragment of the manuscript had been published in the Burroughs compendium, Word Virus.
Works, style, and innovations
Kerouac is generally considered to be the father of the Beat movement, although it must be said that he actively disliked such labels, and, in particular, regarded the subsequent Hippie movement with some disdain. Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of Jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, Kerouac would include ideas he developed in his Buddhist studies, beginning with Gary Snyder. He called this style Spontaneous Prose, a literary technique akin to stream of consciousness.
Jack Kerouac's poem in the center of his namesake alley.
Many of his books exemplified this approach including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. The central features of this writing method were the ideas of breath (borrowed from Jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and not editing a single word (much of his work was edited by Donald Merriam Allen, a major figure in Beat Generation poetry who also edited some of Ginsberg's work as well). Connected with his idea of breath was the elimination of the period, preferring to use a long, connecting dash instead. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words might take on a certain kind of rhythm, though none of it pre-meditated.
Kerouac greatly admired Gary Snyder, many of whose ideas influenced him. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder, and also whole paragraphs from letters Snyder had written to Kerouac.[23] While living with Snyder outside Mill Valley, California in 1956, Kerouac was working on a book centering around Snyder, which he was thinking of calling Visions of Gary.[24] (This eventually became Dharma Bums, which Kerouac described as "mostly about [Snyder]".)[25] That summer, Kerouac took a job as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in Washington, after hearing Snyder's and Philip Whalen's accounts of their own lookout stints. Kerouac described the experience in his novel Desolation Angels.
He would go on for hours, often drunk, to friends and strangers about his method. Allen Ginsberg, initially unimpressed, would later be one of its great proponents, and indeed, he was apparently influenced by Kerouac's free flowing prose method of writing in the composition of his masterpiece "Howl". It was at about the time that Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans that he was approached by Ginsberg and others to formally explicate exactly how he wrote it, how he did Spontaneous Prose. Among the writings he set down specifically about his Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise would be Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty "essentials."
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy Submissive to everything, open, listening Try never get drunk outside your own house Be in love with your life Something that you feel will find its own form Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind Blow as deep as you want to blow Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind The unspeakable visions of the individual No time for poetry but exactly what is Visionary tics shivering in the chest In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition Like Proust be an old teahead of time Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye Write in recollection and amazement for yrself Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea Accept loss forever Believe in the holy contour of life Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better You're a Genius all the time Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..." from On the Road
Some believed that at times Kerouac's writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose. Truman Capote famously said about Kerouac's work, "That's not writing, it's typing." Despite such criticism, it should be kept in mind that what Kerouac said about writing and how he wrote are sometimes seen to be separate. According to Carolyn Cassady and other people who knew him he rewrote and rewrote. Some claim his own style was in no way spontaneous. However it should be taken into account that throughout most of the '50s, Kerouac was constantly trying to have his work published, and consequently he often revised and re-arranged manuscripts in an often futile attempt to interest publishers, as is clearly documented in his collected letters (which are in themselves wonderful examples of his style). The Subterraneans and Visions of Cody are possibly the best examples of Kerouac's free-flowing spontaneous prose method.
Influences
His technique was heavily influenced by Jazz, especially Bebop, and later, Buddhism, as well as the famous "Joan Anderson letter", authored by Neal Cassady.
The Diamond Sutra was the most important Buddhist text for Kerouac, and "probably one of the three or four most influential things he ever read." In 1955, he began an intensive study of this sutra, in a repeating weekly cycle, devoting one day to each of the six Pāramitās, and the seventh to the concluding passage on Samādhi. This was his sole reading on Desolation Peak, and he hoped by this means to condition his mind to emptiness, and possibly to have a vision.
Legacy
Kerouac is considered by some as the "King of the Beats", a title with which Kerouac himself was deeply uncomfortable. Kerouac's plainspeak manner of writing prose, as well as his nearly long-form haiku style of poetry have inspired countless modern neo-beat writers and artists, such as painter George Condo, poet and philosopher Roger Craton, and filmaker John McNaughton.
In 1974 the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was open in his honor by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa University, a private Buddhist University in Boulder, Colorado. The school offers an MFA in Writing & Poetics, a BA in Writing and Literature, a Summer Writing Program, and MFA in Creative Writing.
In 2007, Kerouac was awarded a posthumous honorary degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Further reading
Amburm, Ellis. "Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac". St. Martin's Press, 1999. ISBN 0-312-20677-1
Amram, David. "Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac". Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002.ISBN 1-56025-362-2
Bartlett, Lee (ed.) "The Beats: Essays in Criticism". London: McFarland, 1981.
Beaulieu, Victor-Lévy. "Jack Kerouac: A Chicken Essay". Coach House Press, 1975.
Brooks, Ken. "The Jack Kerouac Digest". Agenda, 2001.
Cassady, Carolyn. "Neal Cassady Collected Letters, 1944-1967". Penguin, 2004. ISBN 0-14-200217-8
Cassady, Carolyn. "Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg". Black Spring Press, 2007.
Challis, Chris. "Quest for Kerouac". Faber & Faber, 1984.
Charters, Ann. "Kerouac". San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973.
Charters, Ann (ed.) "The Portable Beat Reader". New York: Penguin, 1992.
Charters, Ann (ed.) "The Portable Jack Kerouac". New York: Penguin, 1995.
Christy, Jim. "The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac". ECW Press, 1998.
Clark, Tom. "Jack Kerouac". Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984.
Coolidge, Clark. "Now It's Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & the Sounds". Living Batch, 1999.
Dagier, Patricia; Quéméner, Hervé. "Jack Kerouac: Au Bout de la Route ... La Bretagne". An Here, 1999.
Edington, Stephen. "Kerouac's Nashua Roots". Transition, 1999.
Ellis, R.J., "Liar! Liar! Jack Kerouac - Novelist". Greenwich Exchange, 1999.
French, Warren. "Jack Kerouac". Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.
Gaffié, Luc. "Jack Kerouac: The New Picaroon". Postillion Press, 1975.
Giamo, Ben. "Kerouac, The Word and The Way". Southern Illinois U.P., 2000.
Gifford, Barry. "Kerouac's Town". Creative Arts, 1977.
Gifford, Barry; Lee, Lawrence. "Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac". St. Martin's Press, 1978. ISBN 0-14-005269-0
Goldstein, N.W., "Kerouac's On the Road." Explicator 50.1. 1991.
Haynes, Sarah, "An Exploration of Jack Kerouac's Buddhism:Text and Life"
Heller, Christine Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder: Chasing Zen Clouds
Hemmer, Kurt. "Encyclopedia of Beat Literature: The Essential Guide to the Lives and Works of the Beat Writers". Facts on File, Inc., 2007.
Hipkiss, Robert A., "Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism". Regents Press, 1976.
Holmes, John Clellon. "Visitor: Jack Kerouac in Old Saybrook". tuvoti, 1981.
Holmes, John Clellon. "Gone In October: Last Reflections on Jack Kerouac". Limberlost, 1985.
Holton, Robert. "On the Road: Kerouac's Ragged American Journey". Twayne, 1999.
Hrebeniak, Michael. "Action Writing: Jack Kerouac"s Wild Form," Carbondale IL., Southern Illinois UP, 2006.
Huebel, Harry Russell. "Jack Kerouac". Boise State U.P., 1979.
Books by Jack Kerouac
The Town and the City · On the Road · The Subterraneans · The Dharma Bums · Doctor Sax · Maggie Cassidy · Mexico City Blues · Book of Dreams · Tristessa · Visions of Cody · Lonesome Traveler · Big Sur · Visions of Gerard · Desolation Angels · Satori in Paris · Vanity of Duluoz · Pic · Scattered Poems · Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings · Old Angel Midnight · Good Blonde & Others · Orpheus Emerged · Book of Sketches · The Scripture of the Golden Eternity · And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (unpublished)