Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac[1] (/ˈkɛruæk/,[2] March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), often known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist[3] of French Canadian ancestry,[4][5][6] who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.[7]. Kerouac appears intelligent but shy.
He viewed the work as a failure, calling it a "crock as literature" and never actively seeking to publish it.[29].

While employed in this way he met and befriended Abe Green, a young freight train jumper who later introduced Kerouac to Herbert Huncke, a Times Square street hustler and favorite of many Beat Generation writers. At the request of his editors, Kerouac changed the setting of the novel from New York to San Francisco.

In there, it could be any decade. Bop arose as a reaction to the perception of musical theft perpetrated by white entertainers (e.g., Benny Goodman and his swing band) in an attempt to reclaim the cultural property of the black community which had informed every popular music genre. Kerouac subsequently went to the Horace Mann School, a preparatory school in New York City, on a gridiron football scholarship.

Independent filmmaker Michael Polish directed Big Sur, based on the novel, with Jean-Marc Barr cast as Kerouac. [87], An often overlooked[88] literary influence on Kerouac was James Joyce, whose work he alludes to more than any other author. [61], Despite the role which his literary work played in inspiring the counterculture movement of the 1960s, Kerouac was not fond of the movement and also openly criticized it.

In the time between living and writing On the Road, Kerouac had written, at least in part, more than a dozen novels. [10], There is some confusion surrounding his name, partly because of variations on the spelling of Kerouac, and because of Kerouac's own statement of his name as Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac.

Since his death, Kerouac's literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published. A street, rue de Jack Kérouac, is named after him in Quebec City, as well as in the hamlet of Kerouac, Lanmeur, Brittany.

[66][67][68] He is buried at Edson Cemetery in Lowell, Massachusetts.

In 1968, Neal Cassady also died while in Mexico.


Some believed that at times Kerouac's writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose. [25][26] He also studied at The New School.[27].

While Kerouac’s mother worked in a shoe factory and his father worked as a printer, Kerouac attended a French Canadian school in the morning and continued his studies in English in the afternoon. and knocked a rabbi right in the gutter. When Carr eventually confessed to the police, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness.

He had one other sibling, an older sister named Caroline. He bounced around for a few years until he bought his own house, the one next to hers, in 1968.

The published novel runs over 110 pages, having been reconstituted from six distinct files in the Kerouac archive by Professor Cloutier. It could be a poster from an old movie. [39] Between 1955–1956, he lived on and off with his sister, whom he called "Nin," and her husband, Paul Blake, at their home outside of Rocky Mount, N.C. ("Testament, Va." in his works) where he meditated on, and studied, Buddhism. Police officials did, however, say that not all records from that far back have been preserved.

The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or paragraph breaks and was much more explicit than the version which would eventually be published. Kerouac’s sensibility and rock ‘n' roll each evolved from African-American influences. Note and postcard from Jack Kerouac to Malcolm Cowley, Kerouac's editor at Viking Press, April 1956. Jack Kerouac, original name Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, (born March 12, 1922, Lowell, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 21, 1969, St. Petersburg, Florida), American novelist, poet, and leader of the Beat movement whose most famous book, On the Road (1957), had broad cultural influence before it was recognized for its literary merits.

Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of

[89][90] Regarding On the Road, he wrote in a letter to Ginsberg, "I can tell you now as I look back on the flood of language.

Is Ignorant of its own emptiness— [69], At the time of his death, he was living with his third wife, Stella Sampas Kerouac, and his mother Gabrielle.

"Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century" Noodlebrain Press, 2019. She was a devout Catholic, who instilled this deep faith into both her sons. Me.

He wrote to Snyder, referring to a meeting with D.T. 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,"[50] a term with which he never felt comfortable.

Jack Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kéroack (1889–1946) and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque (1895–1973).

[62] Arguments over the movement, which Kerouac believed was only an excuse to be "spiteful," also resulted in him splitting with Ginsberg by 1968.

Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on a novelization of the events, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, soon after.

[100] In the 1980s, the city of San Francisco named a one-way street, Jack Kerouac Alley, in his honor in Chinatown.

Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. “They kept mixing Jack up with Dean Moriarty,” John Clellon Holmes, one of Kerouac’s friends and a fellow member of the Beat Generation, said in the documentary What Happened to Kerouac? [46], Kerouac found enemies on both sides of the political spectrum, the right disdaining his association with drugs and sexual libertinism and the left contemptuous of his anti-communism and Catholicism; characteristically, he watched the 1954 Senate McCarthy hearings smoking marijuana and rooting for the anti-communist crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy. [63], Also in 1968, he appeared on the television show Firing Line produced and hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. (a friend of Kerouac's from his college years). [72] While living with Snyder outside Mill Valley, California, in 1956, Kerouac worked on a book about him, which he considered calling Visions of Gary.

Many of his books exemplified this spontaneous approach, including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. In 2016, a whole volume of previously unpublished works originally written in French by Kerouac was published as La vie est d'hommage.

“He had huge problems with celebrity.

Palgrave-macmillan, 2007. The term Beat Generation was invented by Kerouac during a conversation held with fellow novelist Herbert Huncke.

He left it unfinished, however, and then lost the manuscript, which was eventually sold at auction for nearly $100,000 in 2002, having been discovered years earlier in a Columbia University dorm. Rock n’ roll borrows elements from blues, country-western, boogie, and jazz. [22] This experience, along with his dying brother's vision of the Virgin Mary (as the nuns fawned over him, convinced he was a saint), combined with a later study of Buddhism and an ongoing commitment to Christ, solidified the worldview which would inform Kerouac's work. From 1978 to 1992, Joy Walsh published 28 issues of a magazine devoted to Kerouac, Moody Street Irregulars. [81] The Unknown Kerouac, edited by Todd Tietchen, includes Cloutier's translation of La nuit est ma femme and the completed translation of Sur le Chemin under the title Old Bull in the Bowery. [19] After Gerard died, his mother sought solace in her faith, while his father abandoned it, wallowing in drinking, gambling, and smoking.