After finishing high school, Jack Kerouac enrolled in Columbia University where he was an active student and a player on their football team. During his university years, he encountered the individuals who would later form The Beat Generation, namely Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.
Who Was The Beat Generation’s Jack Kerouac?
Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 to French-Canadian ancestry. Kerouac’s upbringing was very religious, marked by a traumatic event that caused his mother to seek solace in faith. When the young author was four years old, his brother died at the age of nine. His parents reacted very differently to this tragedy. While his mother sought comfort in religion, his father went down a hole of heavy drinking and gambling. These two extremes came to shape Jack Kerouac’s personality later in his life and constituted the two oppositions of his life: spirituality and addiction.
He spoke French with his family until he started learning English at the age of six. It wasn’t until his late teens that he was able to get rid of his French accent and speak in perfect American English. His French roots, however, would never really leave him. Later in his career, he wrote poems and two novellas in his mother tongue.
Kerouac’s university years were marked by another tragic event, which he and Burroughs wrote about in their collaborative novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. The event in question is the murder of David Krammemer by Lucien Carr, a member of the Beats who was a friend of both authors. The two helped him get rid of the body and the weapon and they were prosecuted for it as material witnesses. Kerouac was bailed out by the parents of Edie Parker, his soon-to-be wife.
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During World War II, Kerouac briefly served in the Merchant Marine, completing his first novel there. His first work, titled The Sea is My Brother, wouldn’t see the light of day until after Kerouac’s death as he had no respect for it, nor any interest in publishing it.
On the Road
In the late 1940s, Kerouac moved to Queens in New York City with his parents. This is where he wrote his first novel. The Town and the City was published in 1950 with fairly positive reviews but poor sales. Kerouac wasn’t discouraged by this and he started working on a roman-a-clef—a work based on his trip around the USA and Mexico which he took with his friend and fellow Beat member Neal Cassady. Thor turned into On the Road, a book that recounts the travels of protagonist Sal Paradise, based on Kerouac himself, and Dean Moriarty, based on Neal Cassady. Other characters in the novel were also based on members of the Beat Generation.
Apparently, Kerouac was so inspired to write this piece that he taped paper sheets into a long roll of around 120 feet, enabling him to use his typewriter without the need to reload the machine and interrupt his flow. The author became famous for his stream-of-consciousness style inspired by the free flow of jazz, especially Bebop, and this method of writing defined his most iconic work.
The first draft of On the Road was finished in just 20 days. Afterward came the attempts to get it published. Most publishing houses refused to come near it fearing controversy and a potential obscenity trial similar to those that occurred with Ginserg’s Howl and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
The novel wouldn’t find a home until 1957 when Viking Press agreed to publish it after significant modifications and omissions of many parts depicting sexual activities and drug use.
Was the Father of the Beat Generation Successful?
On the Road became one of the most important novels written in the English language. The book has had a massive cultural influence, especially on the counterculture of the 1960s. Artists like Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Tom Waits have all cited it as a major inspiration.
The remainder of the 1950s was the most productive era for Jack Kerouac, during which he wrote a dozen novels. He also came to discover Buddhism, which would become a fascination of his. Kerouac’s fame which arose from the success of On the Road brought him constant attention, but he never shied away from expressing his opinions. He was criticized for his political beliefs by both Right-wing and Left-wing politicians for different reasons. Kerouac died in 1969 from an abdominal hemorrhage which was caused by his alcohol addiction.
