Kerouac

Born on March 12, 1922, the youngest of three children in a French-Canadian family that had established itself in Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac was by the age of ten already aiming to become a writer. His father ran a print shop and published a local newsletter called the Spotlight. Before long he began writing and producing his own sport sheet, which he sold to friends and acquaintances in Lowell. He attended both Catholic and public schools, and won athletic scholarships to the Horace Mann prep school (in New York) and then to Columbia University. In New York he fell in with fellow literary-icons-to-be Allen Ginsberg, the poet, and William S. Burroughs, the novelist. A broken leg hobbled his college football career, and Kerouac quit Columbia in his sophomore year, eventually joining the merchant marine and then Navy (from which he was discharged). Thus began the restless wandering that would characterize both his legacy and his life.

To Kerouac, “Beat” – a shorthand term for “beatitude” and the idea that the downtrodden are saintly – was not about politics but about spirituality and art. The thirty published and unpublished books he wrote from 1941 to 1969 include Kerouac’s thirteen-volume, more or less autobiographical “Legend of Duluoz” – a study of a particular lifetime, his own, in the manner of Honore’ de Balzac’s Human Comedy or Marcel Poust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

Kerouac set out to become the quintessential literary mythmaker of postwar America, creating his “Legend of Duluoz” by spinning poetic tales about his adventures. “I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing,” Kerouac wrote in his diary in 1949. “And that until then I’ll rush around this world I insist in holy and pull at everyone’s lapel and make them confess to me and to all.” At the time when Norman Mailer was playing sociologist by studying “whit Negro” hipsters, Kerouac sought to depict his fascinatingly inchoate friend Neal Cassady as the modern-day equivalent of the Wild West legends Jim Bridger, Pecos Bill, and Jesse James. Like the Lowell boy he never quite ceased to be, Kerouac saw football players and range-worn cowboys as the paragons of true America; his diaries teem with references to “folk heroes” and praise for Zane Grey’s honest drifters, Herman Melville’s confidence men, and Babe Ruth’s feats on the diamond and in the barroom. Kerouac brought Cassady into the American mythical pantheon as “the mad Ahab at the wheel,” compelling others to join his roaring drive across Walt Whitman’s patchwork Promise Land.