Jack Kerouac Research Paper

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Alexa Leo
Mrs. Garvey
English III Honors
21 January 2016
The Life of Jack Kerouac The iconoclast of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on March 12, 1922 to a French Canadian Family. Kerouac was a serious child, devoted to his controlling mother. From a young age, he created stories inspired first by the media surrounding him, such as radio shows and later by the novels of Thomas Wolfe, the writer he would model himself after. As a result of the decline of the economy in his hometown , Kerouac's father turned to drinking and gambling to cope, leaving the family impoverished. Kerouac attempted to save the family himself by winning a football scholarship to college and entering the insurance business. Eventually, …show more content…

Kerouac fought with the football coach, who refused to let him play. His father's downfall as a result of his alcohol addiction cost him his business, causing Kerouac to drop out of Columbia, "bitterly disappointing the father who had so recently disappointed him". He tried and failed to fit in with the military and ended up sailing with the Merchant Marine. At this time he was hanging around New York with a crowd that would eventually become the future Beat Generation, Columbia students Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, older and wiser William S. Burroughs, and an adventure seeking lively man from Denver named Neal Cassady. Kerouac had already begun writing a novel, stylistically reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe, inspired by his struggle to try and balance his city life with his family values. Entitled The Town and the City, his first published book earned him respect and some recognition as a writer, but did not make him famous.It would be a long time before he would be published again. In this transitional period. Kerouac took several cross-country trips with Neal Cassady while working on his novel, and in his attempt to write about these trips he had begun trying abstract forms of writing, partly inspired by the spontaneous prose he found in Neal

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