Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the author of On the Road (1957), a book that brought him instant fame and labels like "King of the Beats" and "the voice of a generation." Writers Ken Kesey, Haruki Murakami, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, and Tom Robbins have all pointed to Kerouac as a defining influence on their writing. And songwriter Bob Dylan said about On the Road: "It changed my life like it changed everyone else's."
Jack Kerouac was born Jean Louis Kirouac to French-Canadian immigrants, and he didn't learn to speak English until grade school. He was a star athlete; he ran the 100-meter hurdles and played running back on the football team at Columbia University. He ended up dropping out of Columbia but staying in New York, with his girlfriend Edie Parker, who years later said of him:
"He seemed immediately larger than life. He just didn't look like anyone in New York. He had a ruddy complexion and jet-black hair. He looked like he had just walked in from the woods. ... As he often was, Jack was dead broke the night I met him."
During that time in New York, he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and others who would help found the Beat Movement. It was with Neal Cassady that he would take the momentous cross-country road trip in a Cadillac limousine in 1949, going over 100 miles an hour on two-lane roads until the speedometer broke, the trip that would form the backbone of his book On the Road.
The story about how Kerouac composed On the Road is well-known: He cut up strips of tracing paper so that they'd fit in the typewriter, and taped them all together so he wouldn't have to interrupt his flow of writing to adjust or add paper. He wrote the whole thing from start to finish in three weeks, with no paragraph breaks and minimal punctuation; and when he got up from his typewriter, he had in his hands a 119-foot-long scroll of a book that defined his generation.
But there's a bit more to the story. For almost a decade, Kerouac had been keeping careful, meticulously detailed journals — notebooks full of them — about his cross-country travels, and much of the material in his journals appear in his first manuscript. And though he did sit down and have a three-week marathon session in which much of the first draft was produced in 1951, it was not until 1957 that the book was published. In those intervening years, Kerouac was constantly revising the book, trying to please publishers, who kept rejecting his manuscript. One publisher who rejected the book wrote, "His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don't think so."
Kerouac replaced the real names of his friends with pseudonyms (publishers feared libel suits) and he removed sexually explicit passages (publishers feared obscenity charges; this was beforeGinsberg's Howl trial), and Kerouac added various literary touches and rewrote sections of the book.
And scholars have recently discovered that Kerouac had in the early 1950s written another book about his travels on the road that had never been published. It was written in a French dialect called joual that Kerouac grew up speaking, and is called Sur le Chemin, which translates to "On the Road." An additional unpublished French-language novel written by Kerouac has been found. It's entitled La nuit est ma femme.
And just last year, the curator of the Kerouac Archives at the New York Public Library, Isaac Gewirtz, published a 75-page book detailing Jack Kerouac's little-known obsession with fantasy baseball, called Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats(2009). Throughout his early life, Gewirtz explains, Kerouac created elaborate teams, players, and games. Kerouac gave his players names like Wino Love, Heinie Twiett, Warby Pepper, Phegus Cody, and his teams got names like the Cincinnati Blacks and the New York Chevvies. He meticulously recorded their exploits on index cards.
In On the Road, Jack Kerouac wrote: "... 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 centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'" (less)
Original name Jean-Luis Lebris de Kerouac
*The beat generation.
*All of life is a foreign country.
*This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.
*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...
Jack Kerouac, On The Road, 1957
*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 centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”
*I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
* I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.
*My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
*Maybe that's what life is...a wink of the eye and winking stars.
*Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
*What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? -it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
*All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
*Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea," said Japhy. "Remember that book I told you about the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.
*Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk- real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.
*What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?
*No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.
*Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.
*Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.
*...colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness...
*Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.
*Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
*Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
*We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.
*...and everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, it be-at, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat...
*Oh little Cody Pomeray if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark sad earth, with your terrors in a world so malign and inhospitable, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crowd your head with anger, pain, disgrace, worst of all the crapulous poverty in and out of every splintered door of days, if someone could have said to you then, and made you perceive, "Fear life, but don't die; you're alone, everybody's alone. Oh Cody Pomeray, you can't win, you can't lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt.
*It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
Jack Kerouac quote
*Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, estabilished-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.”
*I was going to be left alone on my butt at the other end of the continent. But why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?
° Beat Movement:
developed in the second half of the 1950's. It was launched by a group of poets and novelists who shared a set of attitudes-anti-establishment, anti-intellectual-opposed to the reigning political, moral and cultural values of the post-World War era and claiming self-expression and self-realization. "Beat" alludes to "beaten down" ( by the values of the time), to "beatitudes"
(reached in esoteric or Eastern religions, or drug-induced visionary experiences), or to the "beat" of jazz music. Main poets: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; main novelists: William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.
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