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Jack Kerouac

The Knitting Circle: Literature

Biography,work,bibliography,press cuttings.

US novelist.

His original name was Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac.

He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts to parents from rural communities in the French-speaking part of Quebec. His mother was Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque. His father was Leo-Alcide Kerouac. Jack Kerouac's family were descendents of Breton Canadians who had married Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians. Jack Kerouac did not learn to speak English until he was six.

After Lowell High School he accepted a football scholarship at Columbia University, but he turned his back on this and spent the early years of World War II as a mechanic in Hartford. He then returned to Lowell where he worked as a sports journalist on theLowell Sun.

He was working on an autobiographical novel which was never published.

In 1942 he went to Washington, DC, where he worked briefly on the construction of the Pentagon. He then joined the US merchant navy.

Jack Kerouac is credited with inventing the 'cool' look. While in the US Navy as a galley worker he broke from convention by dressing in chino jeans, white T-shirt, and leather jacket for shore leave as he travelled between Liverpool and London. Pictures of him from this period influenced Marlon Brando.

Jack Kerouac enlisted in the US Navy in 1943, but was discharged after one month, apparently for his indifferent attitude.

His most famous novel wasOn the Road. He considered an earlier draft of the novel a failure and set about trying to find a system of writing which would allow him to get his free flowing ideas down on paper. He taped together separate 12 feet sheets of onionskin paper to produce a scroll almost 120 feet long and typed the 125000-word novel from 2nd. to 20th. April 1951 in Richmond Hill, New York. He had debated with his literary agent on whether to call itRock and Roll Roadin order to boost sales. However, when the book was published on 5th. September, 1957 Jack Kerouac became both famous and a cult figure. The book is apparently structureless and follows two friends as they weave their way across the USA. The main characters Sal Paradise and Dean Moriaty represent Jack Kerouac and his friend Neal Cassady. In 1999 the book was second on the list of sales byAmazon.com.ukand fourth on the list of sales in the UK recorded by Whitaker Booktrack, as reported by John Ezard inThe Guardian, 23rd. October, 1999, page 3. The 120 feet long typescript was bought by a collector for $2.4m (1.7m) on 22nd. May, 2001.

He has been identified as a leader and spokesperson of theBeat Generation, a label he coined, but then came to regret and repudiate.

His friends includedAllen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Neal Cassady who was portrayed as Dean Moriarty inOn the Road.

His death, from an internal haemorrhage, has been described as typical of a drunk. He died at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. He was buried in the Edson Cemetery in his home town of Lowell, Massachusetts.

• Orpheus Emerged, 1945. Unpublished in his lifetime. It was first published in 2000 on the internet.

  • Web site:http://www.livereads.com/kerouac.html

  • Kerouac off the page and on the netby Duncan Campbell inThe Guardian, 23rd. November, 2000, page 20. "e;The novella sheds more light on the young Kerouac. Admirers of his later work will be interested to see, for instance, that his tastes in literature as a young man were very traditional, ranging from the Oxford Book of English Verse to Dostoyevsky and Standhal."e;

    "e;At the time Kerouac wrote Orpheus Emerged, he had just met Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lucien Carr and others in the world of Beat writers around Columbia University in New York. The roman à clef is about a young man torn between his art and the other elements of his life. Kerouac wrote under the name of John."e;

• The Town and the City, 1950.

• On the Road, 1957.
  "e;Stoned fag too doped to get out of the closet."e;

  Julie Burchill, quoted by David Lister in "e;Literary classics panned by critics"e;, inThe Guardian, 18th. January, 1999, page 9.

• The Dharma Bums, 1958.

• Doctor Sax, 1959.

• Big Sur, 1962.

• Jack Kerouac: Early stories and other writings, edited by Paul Marion, published New York: Viking, 248 pages, ISBN 0 670 88822 2.

• Selected Letters 1957-1969, edited by Ann Charters, 2000, Viking, 514 pages, ISBN 0 670 86190 1.

  • Beat, beaten, brokeby Scott Bradfield inThe Times 2, 23rd. March, 2000, page 16. "e;Smartly assembled and annotated by Ann Charters, this second volume of letters is filled with all the predictable excesses of spontaneous prose and dharmic bop: too much, too shaggy, too defensive, too sad. Beginning with the weeks leading up to the publication of Kerouac's second (and best-known) novel,On the Road, it carries on through his resulting incarnations as youth spokesman, celebrity, recluse and drunk."e;

  • Jottings from the hard shoulderby Robert McCrum inThe Observer Review, 26th. March, 2000, page 11. "e;When Anne Charters, a lifelong Kerouac scholar, was first invited by the author to inspect his archive, she did not stumble, as you might imagine, into a room full of smelly old sleeping bags, half-empty whisky bottles and cigarette butts, but was shown 'folders of letters ... filed carefully away'. Later on, Kerouac, now in a terrible alcoholic decline, went through the carbons he had kept of his own typed letters to his friends and provided annotations. Cyril Connolly, once the literary editor ofThe Observer, used to delight in the conundrum: 'What is the book that takes a lifetime to write and which the author will never read? His collected letters.' If ever there was a writer who put the unread book of his life into his correspondence, it was Jean Louis Lebris de Kerouac."e;

  • A wild yea-saying overburstby Michael Greenberg inThe Times Literary Supplement, 14th. April, 2000, pages 29-30. "e;The second volume of correspondence begins in 1957, the year ofOn the Road, and ends two days before his death at the age of forty-seven in October 1969. It provides a disturbing chronicle of precipitous decline."e;

  • 'I cant type like I used to'by Geoff Dyer inThe Guardian: Saturday Review, 15th. April, 2000, page 9. "e;Asked at the end of last year to select my book of the century, I opted forOn the Road. Considered critical judgement or rush of adolescent blood to the head? Perhaps a bit of both. The Kerouac myth urges one away from dispassionate assessment towards the intoxication of the moment; on that basis,On the Roadgets my vote for the remembered rush it first induced. With each subsequent reading, however, the book gets better and better. Most surprising of all is the degree of authorial control. Any more controlled and it would have been self-stifling; any less and it would have ended up like the torrent of junk that came pouring in its wake."e;

    "e;As the first helping of letters made plain, Kerouac kept revisingOn the Roadto make it more spontaneous. The hard-won struggle to master 'spontaneous prose' both enabled Kerouac to write a great book and condemned him, for the rest of his life, to banging out pretty terrible ones."e;

• Ellis Amburn, (1999), "e;Subterranean Kerouac"e;, St Martin's Press
  Short reportby Sebastian Beaumont inGay Times, March, 1999, issue 246, page 73. "e;That Jack Kerouac - beat writer, hipster and author of the best-sellingOn the Road- was a racist, sexist, self-hating, predominantly homosexual homophobe is well-documented, though often marginalised by those who hero-worshipped him for his often explicit eulogies of casual affairs with women. Ellis Amburn contextualises Kerouac well in his ambitious, readable biographySubterranean Kerouac(St Martin's Press, 18.99). Blessed with looks, athleticism and a desperate drive to be 'one of the boys', Kerouac - a life-long alcoholic and drug-addict - never accepted his homosexual feelings, despite the encouragement of openly homosexual friends such as William Burroughs andAllen Ginsberg(both of whom he slept with), and eventually drank himself to death in 1969. A tragic tale of selfishness, excess and wasted talent."e;

• James Campbell, (1999), "e;This is the Beat Generation"e;, reviewed in theAllen Ginsbergsection.

• Ann Charters, (1973), "e;Jack Kerouac: a biography"e;, San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, (London: Deutsch, 1974).

• Barry GiffordandLawrence Lee, (2000), "e;Jack's Book: An oral biography of Jack Kerouac"e;, Edinburgh: Canongate, 393 pages, ISBN 0 86241 928 X (paperback).
  A wild yea-saying overburstby Michael Greenberg inThe Times Literary Supplement, 14th. April, 2000, pages 29-30. "e;WhenJack's Bookwas first published in the United States in 1978, only three of Kerouac's novels were in print and his literary reputation was close to its nadir. Today, more than thirty titles - virtually everything he wrote - are available, including drunkenly scribbled haikus, and a collection of juvenilia and sports stories mimicking William Saroyan and Hemingway (Jack Kerouac: Early stories and other writings, edited by Paul Marion. 248 pp. New York: Viking. $24.95. 0 670 88822 2)."e;

  "e;Today, Kerouac seems to share less artistic kinship with his fellow Beats than with the painter Jackson Pollock. Pollock's drip paintings of the late 1940s and early 50s are the pictorial equivalent of Kerouac's 'rhythmic yawp of expostulation', his 'prose of the future ... limited only by the limitations of time flying by as your mind flies with it'. Both were working from an entrenched American Romantic ideal: that revolutionary genius, unsullied by history or false cultural refinement, would spontaneously arise from America's soil. The ideal could be traced from Jefferson, throughWhitmanand Thoreau, to Hart Crane and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac's chief literary model. Like Pollock, Kerouac was miscast as a primitive."e;

• Dennis McNally, (1979), "e;Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America"e;, New York: Random House.

• Gerald Nicosia, (1983), "e;Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac"e;, New York: Grove Press.

• Steve Turner, "e;Angelheaded Hipster: A life of Jack Kerouac"e;, Bloomsbury, 224 pages, ISBN 0 7475 3096 3.

• Beat icon Kerouac trod a gay road, by John Harlow inThe Sunday Times, 12th. July, 1998, page 7. A review of two new biographies by Ellis Amburn and Barry Miles. "e;Jack Kerouac, author of On The Road and icon of the beatnik generation, degenerated into a rampant homosexual who bedded hundreds of men towards the end of his life, according to two new biographies. The new insight into Kerouac, who boasted that he had slept with 300 women, is based on previously unpublished documents, interviews and eye-witness accounts. Kerouac developed what he called 'animalism', combined with homophobia and racism, before his death from liver failure in 1969. The full extent of his promiscuity is to be revealed for the first time in books to be published in America later this year. Among Kerouac's alleged male conquests wereGore Vidal, the bestselling author."e;

• Kerouac's scroll of consciousness has gotta go, to the highest bidderby Andrew Buncombe inThe Independent, 16th. May, 2001, page 14. "e;The most recent stop on the rollercoaster ride that is Jack Kerouac'sOn the Roadwas Geneva, where a 50-year-old manuscript of the Beat generation's most famous novel went on display yesterday."e;

  "e;The long scroll - compared by Kerouac to the road he had travelled - is expected to fetch about $1.5m (1m) when it goes on sale."e;

• 'Beat bible' on saleby James Bone inThe Times, 19th. May, 2001, page 17. "e;Jack Kerouac's nephew is defending his controversial decision to auction the extraordinary manuscript ofOn the Road, dubbed the Bible of the Beat Generation."e;

  "e;Tony Sampas, whose aunt Stella was Kerouac's third and last wife, says he is forced to sell the scroll because of the 53 per cent death duty on the estate of his late uncle, Stella's brother."e;

• Kerouac draft sells for world recordby Jane Martinson inThe Guardian, 23rd. May, 2001, page 11. "e;The first draft of Jack Kerouac's ground-breaking book On the Road created a new world record for a literary manuscript yesterday when a private collector paid $2.4m (1.7m) for the yellowing, 120ft roll of paper."e;

  "e;Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, a US football team, bought the roll of almost transparent paper covered in barely punctuated words for almost twice its estimate of $1m-$1.5m."e;

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Last altered 5th. May, 2005