Background
Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, United States; the son of Leo-Alcide Keroack and Gabrielle Ange Levesque.
1930
Kerouac family
1944
New York City, New York, United States
Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr by Allen Ginsberg at Columbia University.
1950
Jack Kerouac and Al Hinkle.
1950
Jack Kerouac
1959
Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank on the set of the film "Pull My Daisy" by John Cohen.
1959
New York City, New York, United States
Jack Kerouac, Dody Muller and David Amram.
Lowell, Massachusetts, United States
Lowell High School
231 West 246th St. Bronx, New York 10471 United States
Horace Mann School for Boys
New York City, New York, United States
Columbia University
Jack-Kerouac and Allen-Ginsberg.
Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady.
Jack Kerouac’s "On the Road" was written on one continuous, hundred-and-twenty-foot scroll of typing paper - a savage and unmediated burst.
(Jack Kerouac’s classic novel about friendship, the search...)
Jack Kerouac’s classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of nature First published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac's most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans--mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer--whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco's Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras. From the Trade Paperback edition.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000W4RFHK/?tag=2022091-20
1971
(The classic novel of freedom and the search for authentic...)
The classic novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation September 5th, 2017 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of On the Road Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naiveté and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002IPZFYQ/?tag=2022091-20
1976
("Each book by Jack Kerouac is unique, a telepathic diamon...)
"Each book by Jack Kerouac is unique, a telepathic diamond. With prose set in the middle of his mind, he reveals consciousness itself in all its syntatic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later half XX century, a synthesis of Proust, Céline, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonius Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker, and Kerouac's own athletic sacred insight.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AG06ZTY/?tag=2022091-20
1992
("What I'm beginning to discover now is something beyond t...)
"What I'm beginning to discover now is something beyond the novel and beyond the arbitrary confines of the story. . . . I'm making myself seek to find the wild form, that can grow with my wild heart . . . because now I know MY HEART DOES GROW." Jack Kerouac, in a letter to John Clellon Holmes Written in 1951-52, Visions of Cody was an underground legend by the time it was finally published in 1972. Writing in a radical, experimental form ("the New Journalism fifteen years early," as Dennis McNally noted in Desolate Angel), Kerouac created the ultimate account of his voyages with Neal Cassady during the late forties, which he captured in different form in On the Road. Here are the members of the Beat Generatoin as they were in the years before any label had been affixed to them. Here is the postwar America that Kerouac knew so well and celebrated so magnificently. His ecstatic sense of superabundant reality is informed by the knowledge of mortality: "I'm writing this book because we're all going to die. . . . My heart broke in the general despair and opened up inward to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream." "The most sincere and holy writing I know of our age." Allen Ginsberg
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C1KW9BK/?tag=2022091-20
1993
(In his first frankly autobiographical work, Jack Kerouac ...)
In his first frankly autobiographical work, Jack Kerouac tells the exhilarating story fo the years when he was writing th books that captivated and infuriated the public, restless years of wandering during which he worked as a railway brakeman in California, a steward on a tramp steamer, and a fire lookout on the crest of Desolation Peak in the Cascde Mountains. In his first frankly autobiographical work, Jack Kerouac tells the exhilarating story fo the years when he was writing th books that captivated and infuriated the public, restless years of wandering during which he worked as a railway brakeman in California, a steward on a tramp steamer, and a fire lookout on the crest of Desolation Peak in the Cascde Mountains.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802130747/?tag=2022091-20
1994
(Written over the course of three days and three nights, T...)
Written over the course of three days and three nights, The Subterraneans was generated out of the same kind of ecstatic flash of inspiration that produced another one of Kerouac's early classics, On The Road. Centering around the tempestuous breakup of Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox two denizens of the 1950s San Francisco underground The Subterraneans is a tale of dark alleys and smoky rooms, of artists, visionaries, and adventurers existing outside mainstream America's field of vision.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004L623AO/?tag=2022091-20
2007
("[An] essential Beat masterpiece." --The Village Voice. P...)
"[An] essential Beat masterpiece." --The Village Voice. Perhaps one of the last great dual correspondences of the twentieth century, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters reveals not only the process of creation of the two most celebrated members of the Beat Generation, but also the unfolding of a remarkable friendship of immense pathos and spiritual depth. Through this exhilarating exchange of letters, two-thirds of which have never been published before, Kerouac and Ginsberg emerge first and foremost as writers of artistic passion, innovation, and genius. Vivid and enthralling, the letters, which date from their first meeting in 1944 to Kerouac's untimely death in 1969, chronicle the endless struggle, anguish, and sacrifice involved in giving form to their literary visions.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143119540/?tag=2022091-20
2011
(In the spring of 1943, twenty-one-year old Jack Kerouac s...)
In the spring of 1943, twenty-one-year old Jack Kerouac set out to write his first novel. Working diligently day and night to complete it by hand, he titled it The Sea Is My Brother. Nearly seventy years later, its long-awaited publication provides fascinating details and insight into the early life and development of an American literary icon. A clear precursor to such landmark works as On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Visions of Cody, it is an important formative work that hints at the hallmarks of classic Kerouac: the search for spiritual meaning in a materialistic world, spontaneous travel as the true road to freedom, late nights in bars engaged in intense conversation, the desperate urge to escape from society, and the strange, terrible beauty of loneliness.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B3M3UTM/?tag=2022091-20
2013
(Poetic meditations on joy, consciousness, and becoming on...)
Poetic meditations on joy, consciousness, and becoming one with the infinite universe from the author of On the Road During an unexplained fainting spell, Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac experienced a flash of enlightenment. A student of Buddhist philosophy, Kerouac recognized the experience as “satori,” a moment of life-changing epiphany. The knowledge he gained in that instant is expressed in this volume of sixty-six prose poems with language that is both precise and cryptic, mystical and plain. His vision proclaims, “There are not two of us here, reader and writer, but one golden eternity.” Within these meditations, haikus, and Zen koans is a contemplation of consciousness and impermanence. While heavily influenced by the form of Buddhist poems or sutras, Kerouac also draws inspiration from a variety of religious traditions, including Taoism, Native American spirituality, and the Catholicism of his youth. Far-reaching and inclusive, this collection reveals the breadth of Kerouac’s poetic sensibility and the curiosity, word play, and fierce desire to understand the nature of existence that make up the foundational concepts of Beat poetry and propel all of Kerouac’s writing.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BG9666K/?tag=2022091-20
2016
(Unseen images of the Beats, including many—uniquely—in co...)
Unseen images of the Beats, including many—uniquely—in color This magnificent volume features a remarkable collection of largely unseen photographs of the Beat Generation by renowned Magnum photographer Burt Glinn. This amazing, untouched treasure trove of images was discovered when Reel Art Press was working with Burt Glinn’s widow, Elena, on a larger retrospective of Glinn’s work. Archived with the negatives was a short essay by Jack Kerouac entitled "And This Is The Beat Nightlife of New York," which is published here alongside the photographs. The book features black-and-white shots, and also—uniquely, for images of this era—more than 70 in color. An extremely rare find, these photographs capture the raw energy of the Beat Generation in a way that has never been seen before in print. The photographs were shot between 1957 and 1960 in New York and San Francisco and feature nearly everyone involved in the scene, including writers and artists such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, LeRoi Jones, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick and many more. Glinn was celebrated for his extraordinary talent as a social documentary photographer, and during his time with the Beats his camera captured the spirit of the counterculture—writers, musicians and artists meeting in cafes, bars and parties pursuing a truth and future the mainstream would and could not acknowledge. This exquisite tome is an intimate and fresh insight into the lives of the legendary and influential bohemians and a celebration of Glinn’s inimitable talent. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Burt Glinn (1935–2008) was an American professional photographer who worked with Magnum Photos. He covered revolutionary leader Fidel Castro’s entrance into Havana, Cuba, and photographed people such as Andy Warhol and Helen Frankenthaler. In collaboration with the writer Laurens van der Post, Glinn published A Portrait of All the Russias (1967) and A Portrait of Japan (1968).
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1909526266/?tag=2022091-20
2018
Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, United States; the son of Leo-Alcide Keroack and Gabrielle Ange Levesque.
Kerouac graduated from Lowell High School in 1939. The same year he received a football scholarship to Columbia University, but first he had to attend a year of preparatory school at the Horace Mann School for Boys in the Bronx. Jack also studied at The New School.
Kerouac began his career as a football player at Columdia University in 1940. But he broke his leg in one of his first games and impulsively quit the team and dropped out of the university. However, while at Columbia, Kerouac wrote several sports articles for the student newspaper "Columbia Daily Spectator" and joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity.
Then in 1942, Jack joined the United States Merchant Marine and in 1943 joined the United States Navy, but served only eight days of active duty before arriving on the sick list with a diagnosis of "schizoid personality". Kerouac wrote his first novel "The Sea Is My Brother", while serving in the United States Merchant Marine. It was written in 1942, but the book was published only in 2011.
In 1944, he was arrested as a material witness in the murder of David Kammerer, who had been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. Jack and his friend, William Burroughs collaborated on a novel about the Kammerer killing entitled "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks". Kerouac also wrote about the killing in his novel "Vanity of Duluoz", 1968.
He lived in New York in the late 1940s and wrote his first novel "Town and City" about his struggle to balance the expectations of his family with his unconventional life, which was published in 1950.
Kerouac took several cross-country trips with his friend Neal Cassady in the late 1940s and early 1950s, which became the basis for his most famous work "On The Road", 1957. Jack wrote the novel on a single scroll in three weeks, but he had also spent several years making notes in preparation for this literary outburst.
In 1952, he wrote "Visions of Cody", "Dr. Sax" and "October in Railroad Earth". In 1953, Kerouac completed "Maggie Cassidy", a romantic tale of his teenage days, "The Subterraneans" and a statement of his writing principles, "The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose". In 1955, Jack wrote "Mexico City Blues" and "Tristessa", and in 1956 he wrote "Visions of Gerard", "The Scripture of the Golden Eternity" and "Old Angel Midnight" as well as book one of "Desolation Angels".
Also in 1957, he became an instant celebrity and spokesman for the Beat Generation. He often appeared drunk and interviews frequently dissolved into didactic arguments. In 1958, Kerouac wrote "The Dharma Bums" as a commercial followup to "On The Road", but then fell silent for four years before writing again. By 1960 Jack was a sick and dying alcoholic and suffered a nervous breakdown. He died of a massive abdominal hemorrhage on October 21, 1969 with a pad in his lap and pen in his hand.
(In his first frankly autobiographical work, Jack Kerouac ...)
1994(The classic novel of freedom and the search for authentic...)
1976(Jack Kerouac’s classic novel about friendship, the search...)
1971(Poetic meditations on joy, consciousness, and becoming on...)
2016(Unseen images of the Beats, including many—uniquely—in co...)
2018(Written over the course of three days and three nights, T...)
2007("What I'm beginning to discover now is something beyond t...)
1993(In the spring of 1943, twenty-one-year old Jack Kerouac s...)
2013("Each book by Jack Kerouac is unique, a telepathic diamon...)
1992("[An] essential Beat masterpiece." --The Village Voice. P...)
2011
Quotations:
"Happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream."
"The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together."
"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."
"Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don’t get mad they’ll bite you - but stay mad and you’ll never be bitten. Dogs don’t respect humility and sorrow."
"Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry."
Kerouac spoke French until he learned English at age six and he did not speak English confidently until his late teens.
As a spokesman Kerouac was contrary and unintelligible.
Jack Kerouac married Edie Parker in 1944, but the marriage broke up after two months. In 1950, he married Joan Havertym, with whom he divorced in 1951. They had a daughter. Then fifteen years later Kerouac married Stella Sampas.