American writer and poet, the author of 21 books including “The Town and the City,” 1950, “The Subterraneans,” 1958 and “Big Sur.” He is perhaps best known for “The Dharma Bums,” 1958 and “On The Road,” 1957, the classic novels that established him as a hero who epitomized the style of living and writing associated with the “Beat Movement,” and serving as the Bible for Beatniks.
Jack Kerouac was the third of four children born to Gabrielle and Leo Kerouac, French-Canadian immigrants who moved to New England. With English as his second language, he grew up in Lowell, acutely suffering the loss at age nine of his younger brother, four-year-old Gerard. After graduating Lowell High School in 1939, he moved to New York City, where he attended Horace Mann Preparatory School and two years later, began a brief stint at Columbia University on a football scholarship.
By 1942 he was sailing to Greenland as a merchant marine and one year later, enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he was soon discharged on psychiatric grounds. He then sailed to Liverpool as a merchant seaman. When he returned to New York City in 1944, he met Lucien Carr, who introduced him to Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. He was abruptly jailed as an accessory and material witness in the David Kammerer murder case when Kammerer was killed by Carr. Kerouac made a clean getaway from the case with a hasty marriage to Edie Parker so that her family would pay his bail.
In 1945 Kerouac began work on the account of his Lowell boyhood with “The Town and The City” when he met the charismatic and bisexual Neal Cassady, a Denver reform school graduate and car thief who eventually became Kerouac’s lover and buddy. After his marriage to Parker was annulled that same year, he collaborated with William S. Burroughs on an unpublished novel, “And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks,” an account of the events surrounding the Kammerer murder. Spending the next three years traveling the country with Cassady, during which time he coined the term “Beat Generation,” the pair arrived in New York in 1949 where “The Town and The City” was published the following year. After jaunts with Cassady to Denver and Mexico, he made a second marriage to Joan Haverty in New York in the latter half of 1950.
During a three week binge of creativity in the following April and May, he wrote “On The Road” on a single ream of paper. After separating from Haverty, he discovered the compositional method of “sketching” and “spontaneous prose,” and rewrote “On The Road” as an experimental work. Following Neal Cassady’s marriage to Caroline, Kerouac moved into the attic of their San Francisco home, where they made up a ménage a trois. He was hospitalized in 1951 with thrombophlebitis as a result of heavy Benzedrine use.
Between 1952 and 1956, Kerouac roamed the US and Mexico taking odd jobs to support himself while studying Buddhism, writing and notably, attending the first public reading of “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco, 13 October 1955. By 1957, after traveling throughout Europe and North Africa, he was living in Greenwich Village with Joyce Glassman. After moving to Orlando, Florida that same year with his mother, he wrote “The Dharma Bums” and a year later, bought a house in Northport, NY. While living in Northport, he wrote a column for “Escapade” and narrated the film “Pull My Daisy,” which was based on his play “The Beat Generation.”
While living in Big Sur, California in 1960, Kerouac suffered alcohol withdrawal coupled with a nervous breakdown. During the next four years he lived with his mother in Orlando and Northport and traveled through France. In 1966 he made his third and final marriage, to Stella Sampas, sister of his childhood friend Sebastian “Sammy” Sampas. His explanation for the improbable match is singularly descriptive: “I was torn between Carolyn and Neal Cassady so I married Stella because she’s Sammy’s sister. Figure that out and you’ve got the secret to my life and work.” Kerouac’s_ marriage to Stella was probably celibate, and he was often arrested for public drunkenness as a means of taking out his frustration.
While Kerouac hit the road for in search of direct experience and spontaneity, his acute wanderlust left him homeless in his soul, even when he owned a home. Despite the chaos in every area of his life, he meticulously kept an archive of every sexual experience he had with a woman. One of these women bore him a daughter in 1952, a girl whom he met twice but never acknowledged. His daughter Jan states, “I wish I had known him better. He could spout all kinds of things on paper, but in person, he was non-communicative.” Never cutting the cord with his mother, Kerouac was likewise unable to cope with fame, fatherhood and his bi-sexuality. “He wanted to be seen as the voice of America, but instead he was seen as a voice of juvenile delinquents, and that hurt him a lot…He couldn’t take the easy bullet because he was a Catholic. But he rationalized that it was not a sin if he drank himself to death.” His final years were marked by virulent alcohol rages and fierce anti-Semitism.
Kerouac died on 21 October 1969 in St. Petersburg, Florida, of an abdominal hemorrhage due to the complications associated with alcohol abuse. He was 47.
Link to Wikipedia biography