1. Jack Kerouac Poetry
2. Jack Kerouac Poems On The Road
3. Jack Kerouac Poems Online

Jack Kerouac was born Jean Louis Kerouac in Lowell, Massachussetts on March 12, 1922. His attended Lowell, Massachussetts High School, the Horace Mann School for Boys, Columbia College, and the New School for Social Research, for liberal arts. On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States.It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use.

1. Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac became famous as Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, the novel that is considered to be a quintessential statement of the 1950s literary movement known as the Beat Generation.
2. Jack Kerouac was born Jean Louis Kerouac in Lowell, Massachussetts on March 12, 1922. His attended Lowell, Massachussetts High School, the Horace Mann School for Boys, Columbia College, and the New School for Social Research, for liberal arts.

Jack Kerouac (/ˈkɛruæk/;^[2] born Jean-Louis Kérouac (though he called himself Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac); March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist and poet of French-Canadian ancestry.^[3][4][5][6]

He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation.^[7] Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. He became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements.^[8][9]

In 1969, at age 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since his death, Kerouac's literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published. All of his books are in print today, including The Town and the City, On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody, The Sea Is My Brother, and Big Sur.

• 1Biography
• 2Style
• 4Works
• 5Discography
• 7References

Biography[edit]

Early life and adolescence[edit]

Jack Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kéroack (1899–1946) and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque (1895–1973).^[10]

There is some confusion surrounding his name, partly because of variations on the spelling of Kerouac, and because of Kerouac's own statement of his name as Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac. His reason for that statement seems to be linked to an old family legend that the Kerouacs had descended from Baron François Louis Alexandre Lebris de Kerouac. Kerouac's baptism certificate lists his name simply as Jean Louis Kirouac, the most common spelling of the name in Quebec.^[11] Research has shown that Kerouac's roots were indeed in Brittany, and he was descended from a middle-class merchant colonist, Urbain-François Le Bihan, Sieur de Kervoac, whose sons married French Canadians.^[12][13]

Kerouac's father Leo had been born into a family of potato farmers in the village of Saint-Hubert-de-Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec. Jack also had various stories on the etymology of his surname, usually tracing it to Irish, Breton, Cornish or other Celtic roots.

In one interview he claimed it was from the name of the Cornish language (Kernewek) and that the Kerouacs had fled from Cornwall to Brittany.^[14] Another version was that the Kerouacs had come to Cornwall from Ireland before the time of Christ and the name meant 'language of the house'.^[15] In still another interview he said it was an Irish word for 'language of the water' and related to Kerwick.^[16] Kerouac, derived from Kervoach, is the name of a town in Brittany in Lanmeur, near Morlaix.^[12]

Jack Kerouac later referred to 34 Beaulieu Street as 'sad Beaulieu'. The Kerouac family was living there in 1926 when Jack's older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever, aged nine. This deeply affected four-year-old Jack, who would later say that Gerard followed him in life as a guardian angel. This is the Gerard of Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard. He had one other sibling, an older sister named Caroline. Kerouac was referred to as Ti Jean or little John around the house during his childhood.^[11]

Kerouac spoke French until he began learning English at age six; he did not speak English confidently until his late teens.^[17] He was a serious child who was devoted to his mother, who played an important role in his life. She was a devout Catholic, who instilled this deep faith into both her sons.^[18] Kerouac would later say that his mother was the only woman he ever loved.^[19] After Gerard died, his mother sought solace in her faith, while his father abandoned it, wallowing in drinking, gambling, and smoking.^[18]

Some of Kerouac's poetry was written in French, and in letters written to friend Allen Ginsberg towards the end of his life, he expressed a desire to speak his parents' native tongue again. In 2016, a whole volume of previously unpublished works originally written in French by Kerouac was published as La vie est d'hommage.^[20][21]

On May 17, 1928, while six years old, Kerouac had his first Confession.^[22] For penance, he was told to say a rosary, during which he heard God tell him that he had a good soul, that he would suffer in life and die in pain and horror, but would in the end receive salvation.^[22] This experience, along with his dying brother's vision of the Virgin Mary (as the nuns fawned over him, convinced he was a saint), combined with a later study of Buddhism and an ongoing commitment to Christ, solidified the worldview which would inform Kerouac's work.^[22]

Kerouac once told Ted Berrigan, in an interview for The Paris Review, of an incident in the 1940s in which his mother and father were walking together in a Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York. He recalled 'a whole bunch of rabbis walking arm in arm .. teedah- teedah – teedah .. and they wouldn't part for this Christian man and his wife, so my father went POOM! and knocked a rabbi right in the gutter.'^[23][24] Leo, after the death of his child, also treated a priest with similar contempt, angrily throwing him out of the house despite his invitation from Gabrielle.^[18]

Kerouac's athletic skills as a running back in football for Lowell High School earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and Columbia University. He entered Columbia University after spending a year at Horace Mann School, where he earned the requisite grades for entry to Columbia. Kerouac broke a leg playing football during his freshman season, and during an abbreviated second year he argued constantly with coach Lou Little, who kept him benched. While at Columbia, Kerouac wrote several sports articles for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, and joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity.^[25][26] He also studied at The New School.^[27]

Early adulthood[edit]

When his football career at Columbia ended, Kerouac dropped out of the university. He continued to live for a time in New York's Upper West Side with his girlfriend and future first wife, Edie Parker. It was during this time that he met the Beat Generation people—now famous—with whom he would always be associated, and who as characters formed the basis of many of his novels, including Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, Lucien Carr and William S. Burroughs.

Kerouac joined the United States Merchant Marine in 1942 and in 1943 joined the United States Navy, but served only eight days of active duty before arriving on the sick list. According to his medical report, Kerouac said he 'asked for an aspirin for his headaches and they diagnosed me dementia praecox and sent me here.' The medical examiner reported that Kerouac's military adjustment was poor, quoting Kerouac: 'I just can't stand it; I like to be by myself.' Two days later he was honorably discharged on psychiatric grounds (he was of 'indifferent character' with a diagnosis of 'schizoid personality').^[28]

While serving in the United States Merchant Marine, Kerouac wrote his first novel The Sea Is My Brother. Although written in 1942, the book was not published until 2011, some 42 years after Kerouac's death and 70 years after it was written. Kerouac described the work as being about 'man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies.' He viewed the work as a failure, calling it a 'crock as literature', and he never actively sought to publish it.^[29]

In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness in the murder of David Kammerer, who had been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. William Burroughs was also a native of St. Louis, and it was through Carr that Kerouac came to know both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. According to Carr, Kammerer's homosexual obsession turned aggressive, finally provoking Carr to stab him to death in self-defense. Carr dumped the body in the Hudson River. Afterwards, Carr sought help from Kerouac. Kerouac disposed of the murder weapon and buried Kammerer's eyeglasses. Carr, encouraged by Burroughs, turned himself in to the police. Kerouac and Burroughs were later arrested as material witnesses. Kerouac's father refused to pay his bail. Kerouac then agreed to marry Edie Parker if her parents would pay the bail. (Their marriage was annulled in 1948.)^[30] Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on a novel about the Kammerer killing entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Though the book was not published during their lifetimes, an excerpt eventually appeared in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (and as noted below, the novel was finally published late 2008). Kerouac also later wrote about the killing in his novel Vanity of Duluoz.

Later, Kerouac lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they had also moved to New York. He wrote his first published novel, The Town and the City, and began the famous On the Road around 1949 when living there.^[31] His friends jokingly called him 'The Wizard of Ozone Park', alluding to Thomas Edison's nickname, 'the Wizard of Menlo Park', and to the film The Wizard of Oz.^[32]

Early career: 1950–1957[edit]

The Town and the City was published in 1950 under the name 'John Kerouac' and, though it earned him a few respectable reviews, the book sold poorly. Heavily influenced by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe, it reflects on the generational epic formula and the contrasts of small town life versus the multi-dimensional, and larger life of the city. The book was heavily edited by Robert Giroux, with around 400 pages taken out.

For the next six years, Kerouac continued to write regularly. Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled 'The Beat Generation' and 'Gone on the Road,' Kerouac completed what is now known as On the Road in April 1951, while living at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty.^[34] The book was largely autobiographical and describes Kerouac's road-trip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady in the late 40s and early 50s, as well as his relationships with other Beat writers and friends. He completed the first version of the novel during a three-week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. Kerouac wrote the final draft in 20 days, with Joan, his wife, supplying him with benzedrine, cigarettes, bowls of pea soup and mugs of coffee to keep him going.^[35] Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paper^[36] into long strips, wide enough for a typewriter, and taped them together into a 120-foot (37 m) long roll which he then fed into the machine. This allowed him to type continuously without the interruption of reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or paragraph breaks and was much more explicit than the version which would eventually be published. Though 'spontaneous,' Kerouac had prepared long in advance before beginning to write.^[37] In fact, according to his Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the work in his journals over the several preceding years.

Though the work was completed quickly, Kerouac had a long and difficult time finding a publisher. Before On the Road was accepted by Viking Press, Kerouac got a job as a 'railroad brakeman and fire lookout' (see Desolation Peak (Washington)) traveling between the East and West coasts of the United States to earn money, frequently finding rest and the quiet space necessary for writing at the home of his mother. While employed in this way he met and befriended Abe Green, a young freight train jumper who later introduced Kerouac to Herbert Huncke, a Times Square street hustler and favorite of many Beat Generation writers. During this period of travel, Kerouac wrote what he considered to be 'his life's work': Vanity of Duluoz.^[38] Between 1955-1956, he lived on and off with his sister, whom he called 'Nin,' and her husband, Paul Blake, at their home outside of Rocky Mount, N.C. ('Testament, Va.' in his works) where he meditated on, and studied, Buddhism.^[39] He wrote Some of the Dharma, an imaginative treatise on Buddhism, while living there.^[40][41]

Publishers rejected On the Road because of its experimental writing style and its sexual content. Many editors were also uncomfortable with the idea of publishing a book that contained what were, for the era, graphic descriptions of drug use and homosexual behavior—a move that could result in obscenity charges being filed, a fate that later befell Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Ginsberg's Howl.

According to Kerouac, On the Road 'was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever Established and really must not be spoken about.'^[18] According to his biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley, On the Road has been misinterpreted as a tale of companions out looking for kicks, but the most important thing to comprehend is that Kerouac was an American Catholic author – for example, virtually every page of his diary bore a sketch of a crucifix, a prayer, or an appeal to Christ to be forgiven.^[42]

In the spring of 1951, while pregnant, Joan Haverty left and divorced Kerouac.^[43] In February 1952, she gave birth to Kerouac's only child, Jan Kerouac, though he refused to acknowledge her as his daughter until a blood test confirmed it 9 years later.^[44] For the next several years Kerouac continued writing and traveling, taking long trips through the U.S. and Mexico. He often experienced episodes of heavy drinking and depression. During this period, he finished drafts of what would become ten more novels, including The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Tristessa, and Desolation Angels, which chronicle many of the events of these years.

In 1953, he lived mostly in New York City, having a brief but passionate affair with an African-American woman. This woman was the basis for the character named 'Mardou' in the novel The Subterraneans. At the request of his editors, Kerouac changed the setting of the novel from New York to San Francisco.^{[original research?]}

In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of his study of Buddhism. However, Kerouac had earlier taken an interest in Eastern thought. In 1946 he read Heinrich Zimmer's Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. In 1955, Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, titled Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, which was unpublished during his lifetime, but eventually serialized in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993–95. It was published by Viking in September 2008.^[45]

Kerouac found enemies on both sides of the political spectrum, the right disdaining his association with drugs and sexual libertinism and the left contemptuous of his anti-communism and Catholicism; characteristically, he watched the 1954 Senate McCarthy hearings smoking marijuana and rooting for the anti-communist crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy.^[18] In Desolation Angels he wrote, 'when I went to Columbia all they tried to teach us was Marx, as if I cared' (considering Marxism, like Freudianism, to be an illusory tangent).^[46]

In 1957, after being rejected by several other publishers, On the Road was finally purchased by Viking Press, which demanded major revisions prior to publication.^[37] Many of the more sexually explicit passages were removed and, fearing libel suits, pseudonyms were used for the book's 'characters.' These revisions have often led to criticisms of the alleged spontaneity of Kerouac's style.^[36]

Later career: 1957–1969[edit]

In July 1957, Kerouac moved to a small house at 1418½ Clouser Avenue in the College Park section of Orlando, Florida, to await the release of On the Road. Weeks later, a review of the book by Gilbert Millstein appeared in The New York Times proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation.^[47] Kerouac was hailed as a major American writer. His friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among others, became a notorious representation of the Beat Generation. The term Beat Generation was invented by Kerouac during a conversation held with fellow novelist Herbert Huncke. Huncke used the term 'beat' to describe a person with little money and few prospects.^[48] 'I'm beat to my socks', he had said. Kerouac's fame came as an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing.

Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the post-World War II Beat Generation and Kerouac came to be called 'the king of the beat generation,'^[49] a term with which he never felt comfortable. He once observed, 'I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic', showing the reporter a painting of Pope Paul VI and saying, 'You know who painted that? Me.'^[50]

The success of On the Road brought Kerouac instant fame. His celebrity status brought publishers desiring unwanted manuscripts that were previously rejected before its publication.^[19] After nine months, he no longer felt safe in public. He was badly beaten by three men outside the San Remo Cafe at 189 Bleecker Street in New York City one night. Neal Cassady, possibly as a result of his new notoriety as the central character of the book, was set up and arrested for selling marijuana.^[51][52]

In response, Kerouac chronicled parts of his own experience with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco-area poets, in The Dharma Bums, set in California and Washington and published in 1958. It was written in Orlando between November 26^[53] and December 7, 1957.^[54] To begin writing Dharma Bums, Kerouac typed onto a ten-foot length of teleprinter paper, to avoid interrupting his flow for paper changes, as he had done six years previously for On the Road.^[53]

Kerouac was demoralized by criticism of Dharma Bums from such respected figures in the American field of Buddhism as Zen teachers Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Alan Watts. He wrote to Snyder, referring to a meeting with D.T. Suzuki, that 'even Suzuki was looking at me through slitted eyes as though I was a monstrous imposter.' He passed up the opportunity to reunite with Snyder in California, and explained to Philip Whalen 'I'd be ashamed to confront you and Gary now I've become so decadent and drunk and don't give a shit. I'm not a Buddhist any more.'^[55] In further reaction to their criticism, he quoted part of Abe Green's café recitation, Thrasonical Yawning in the Abattoir of the Soul: 'A gaping, rabid congregation, eager to bathe, are washed over by the Font of Euphoria, and bask like protozoans in the celebrated light.' Many consider that this^{[weasel words]} clearly indicated Kerouac's journey on an emotional roller coaster of unprecedented adulation and spiritual demoralization.^{[original research?]}

Kerouac also wrote and narrated a beat movie titled Pull My Daisy (1959), directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. It starred poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, musician David Amram and painter Larry Rivers among others.^[56] Originally to be called The Beat Generation, the title was changed at the last moment when MGM released a film by the same name in July 1959 that sensationalized beatnik culture.

The television series Route 66 (1960–1964), featuring two untethered young men 'on the road' in a Corvette seeking adventure and fueling their travels by apparently plentiful temporary jobs in the various U.S. locales framing the anthology-styled stories, gave the impression of being a commercially sanitized misappropriation of Kerouac's story model for On the Road.^[57] Even the leads, Buz and Todd, bore a resemblance to the dark, athletic Kerouac and the blonde Cassady/Moriarty, respectively. Kerouac felt he'd been conspicuously ripped off by Route 66 creator Stirling Silliphant and sought to sue him, CBS, the Screen Gems TV production company, and sponsor Chevrolet, but was somehow counseled against proceeding with what looked like a very potent cause of action.^[57]

John Antonelli's 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie begins and ends with footage of Kerouac reading from On the Road and Visions of Cody on The Steve Allen Plymouth Show in November 1959. Kerouac appears intelligent but shy. 'Are you nervous?' asks Steve Allen. 'Naw,' says Kerouac, sweating and fidgeting.^[58]

In 1965, he met the poet Youenn Gwernig who was a Breton American like him in New York, and they became friends. Gwernig used to translate his Breton language poems in English so that Kerouac could read and understand them : 'Meeting with Jack Kerouac in 1965, for instance, was a decisive turn. Since he could not speak Breton he asked me : 'Would you not write some of your poems in English? I'd really like to read them ! .. ' So I wrote an Diri Dir – Stairs of Steel for him, and kept on doing so. That's why I often write my poems in Breton, French and English.'^[59]

In the following years, Kerouac suffered the loss of his older sister to a heart attack in 1964 and his mother suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1966. In 1968, Neal Cassady also died while in Mexico.^[60]

Also in 1968, he appeared on the television show Firing Line produced and hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. (a friend of Kerouac's from his college years). Kerouac talked about the counterculture of the 1960s in what would be his last appearance on television.^[61]

Death[edit]

At eleven o'clock, on the morning of October 20, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kerouac was sitting in his favorite chair drinking whiskey and malt liquor, working on a book about his father's print shop in Lowell, Massachusetts. He suddenly felt nauseated and walked to the bathroom, where he began to vomit blood. Kerouac was taken to a nearby hospital, suffering from an esophageal hemorrhage. He received several transfusions in an attempt to make up for the loss of blood, and doctors subsequently attempted surgery, but a damaged liver prevented his blood from clotting. He died at 5:15 the following morning at St. Anthony's Hospital, never having regained consciousness after the operation. His cause of death was listed as an internal hemorrhage (bleeding esophageal varices) caused by cirrhosis, the result of longtime alcohol abuse.^[62][63] A possible contributing factor was an untreated hernia he suffered in a bar fight several weeks earlier.^[64][65][66] He is buried at Edson Cemetery, Lowell, Massachusetts.^[67]

At the time of his death, he was living with his third wife, Stella Sampas Kerouac, and his mother Gabrielle. Kerouac's mother inherited most of his estate.

He was honored posthumously with a Doctor of Letters degree from his hometown University of Massachusetts Lowell on June 2, 2007.^[68]

Style[edit]

Kerouac is generally considered to be the father of the Beat movement, although he actively disliked such labels. Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion ofjazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, Kerouac included ideas he developed from his Buddhist studies that began with Gary Snyder. He often referred to his style as 'spontaneous prose.'^[69] Although Kerouac's prose was spontaneous and purportedly without edits, he primarily wrote autobiographical novels (or roman à clef) based upon actual events from his life and the people with whom he interacted.

Many of his books exemplified this spontaneous approach, including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. The central features of this writing method were the ideas of breath (borrowed from jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and limited revision. Connected with this idea of breath was the elimination of the period, substituting instead a long connecting dash. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words take on a certain musical rhythm and tempo.

Kerouac greatly admired and was influenced by Gary Snyder. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder, and includes excerpts of letters from Snyder.^[70] While living with Snyder outside Mill Valley, California, in 1956, Kerouac worked on a book about him, which he considered calling Visions of Gary.^[71] (This eventually became Dharma Bums, which Kerouac described as 'mostly about [Snyder].')^[72] That summer, Kerouac took a job as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in Washington, after hearing Snyder's and Whalen's stories of working as fire spotters. On Desolation Peak he'd hoped to 'come face to face with God or Tathagata and find out once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence. But instead I'd come face to face with myself .. and many's the time I thought I'd die of boredom or jump off the mountain.'^[73] Kerouac described the experience in Desolation Angels and later in The Dharma Bums'.

Kerouac would go on for hours, often drunk, to friends and strangers about his method. Allen Ginsberg, initially unimpressed, would later be one of his great proponents, and it was Kerouac's free-flowing prose method that inspired the composition of Ginsberg's poem Howl. It was at about the time of The Subterraneans that he was encouraged by Ginsberg and others to formally explain his style. Of his expositions of the Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise was Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of 30 'essentials'.

—On the Road

Some believed that at times Kerouac's writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose. Truman Capote famously said about Kerouac's work 'That's not writing, it's typing'.^[74] According to Carolyn Cassady and others, he constantly rewrote and revised his work.^[75]

Although the body of Kerouac's work has been published in English, recent research has shown that, in addition to his poetry and letters to friends and family, he also wrote unpublished works of fiction in French. All these works, including La nuit est ma femme, Sur le chemin, and large sections of Maggie Cassidy (originally written in French), have now been published together in a volume entitled La vie est d'hommage (Boréal, 2016) edited by University of Pennsylvania professor Jean-Christophe Cloutier. In 1996, the Nouvelle Revue Française published excerpts and an article on 'La nuit est ma femme', and scholar Paul Maher Jr., in his biography Kerouac: His Life and Work', discussed Sur le chemin's plot and characters. The novella, completed in five days in Mexico during December 1952, is a telling example of Kerouac's attempts at writing in his first language, a language he often called Canuck French. Kerouac refers to this short novel in a letter addressed to Neal Cassady (who is commonly known as the inspiration for the character Dean Moriarty) dated January 10, 1953. The published novel runs over 110 pages, having been reconstituted from six distinct files in the Kerouac archive by Professor Cloutier. Set in 1935, mostly on the East Coast, it explores some of the recurring themes of Kerouac's literature by way of a spoken word narrative. Here, as with most of his French writings, Kerouac writes with little regard for grammar or spelling, often relying on phonetics in order to render an authentic reproduction of the French-Canadian vernacular. Even though this work has the same title as one of his best known English novels, it is the original French version of an incomplete translation that would later become Old Bull in the Bowery (now published in The Unknown Kerouac from the Library of America).^[76]The Unknown Kerouac, edited by Todd Tietchen, includes Cloutier's translation of La nuit est ma femme and the completed translation of Sur le Chemin under the title Old Bull in the Bowery. La nuit est ma femme was written in early 1951 and completed a few days or weeks before he began the original English version of On the Road, as many scholars, such as Paul Maher Jr., Joyce Johnson, Hassan Melehy, and Yannis Livadas^[77] have pointed out.

Influences[edit]

Kerouac's early writing, particularly his first novel The Town and the City, was more conventional, and bore the strong influence of Thomas Wolfe. The technique Kerouac developed that later made him famous was heavily influenced by jazz, especially Bebop, and later, Buddhism, as well as the famous Joan Anderson letter written by Neal Cassady.^[78] The Diamond Sutra was the most important Buddhist text for Kerouac, and 'probably one of the three or four most influential things he ever read'.^[79] In 1955, he began an intensive study of this sutra, in a repeating weekly cycle, devoting one day to each of the six Pāramitās, and the seventh to the concluding passage on Samādhi. This was his sole reading on Desolation Peak, and he hoped by this means to condition his mind to emptiness, and possibly to have a vision.^[80]

An often overlooked^[81] literary influence on Kerouac was James Joyce, whose work he alludes to more than any other author.^[82] Kerouac had high esteem for Joyce and he often used Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique.^[82][83] Regarding On the Road, he wrote in a letter to Ginsberg, 'I can tell you now as I look back on the flood of language. It is like Ulysses and should be treated with the same gravity.'^[84] Additionally, Kerouac admired Joyce's experimental use of language, as seen in his novel Visions of Cody, which uses an unconventional narrative as well as a multiplicity of authorial voices.^[85]

Legacy[edit]

Jack Kerouac and his literary works had a major impact on the popular rock music of the 1960s. Artists including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, the Grateful Dead, and The Doors all credit Kerouac as a significant influence on their music and lifestyles. This is especially so with members of the band The Doors, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek who quote Jack Kerouac and his novel On the Road as one of the band's greatest influences.^[86] In his book Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, Ray Manzarek (keyboard player of The Doors) wrote 'I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed.' The alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs wrote a song bearing his name, 'Hey Jack Kerouac' on their 1987 album In My Tribe. The 2000 Barenaked Ladies song, Baby Seat, from the album Maroon, references Kerouac.^[87]

In 1974, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was opened in his honor by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa University, a private Buddhist university in Boulder, Colorado. The school offers a BA in Writing and Literature, MFAs in Writing & Poetics and Creative Writing, and a summer writing program.^[88]

From 1978 to 1992, Joy Walsh published 28 issues of a magazine devoted to Kerouac, Moody Street Irregulars.

Kerouac's French-Canadian origins inspired a 1987 National Film Board of Canada docudrama Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey, directed by Acadian poet Herménégilde Chiasson.^[89]

In the mid-1980s, Kerouac Park was placed in downtown Lowell, Massachusetts.^[90]

A street, rue de Jack Kérouac, is named after him in Quebec City, as well as in the hamlet of Kerouac, Lanmeur, Brittany. An annual Kerouac festival was established in Lanmeur in 2010.^[91] In the 1980s, the city of San Francisco named a one-way street, Jack Kerouac Alley, in his honor in Chinatown.

In 1997, the house on Clouser Avenue where The Dharma Bums was written was purchased by a newly formed non-profit group, The Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence Project of Orlando, Inc. This group provides opportunities for aspiring writers to live in the same house in which Kerouac was inspired, with room and board covered for three months. In 1998, the Chicago Tribune published a story by journalist Oscar J. Corral that described a simmering legal dispute between Kerouac's family and the executor of daughter Jan Kerouac's estate, Gerald Nicosia. The article, citing legal documents, showed that Kerouac's estate, worth only $91 at the time of his death, was worth $10 million in 1998.

In 2007, Kerouac was awarded a posthumous honorary degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.^[92]

In 2009, the movie One Fast Move or I'm Gone – Kerouac's Big Sur was released. It chronicles the time in Kerouac's life that led to his novel Big Sur, with actors, writers, artists, and close friends giving their insight into the book. The movie also describes the people and places on which Kerouac based his characters and settings, including the cabin in Bixby Canyon. An album released to accompany the movie, 'One Fast Move or I'm Gone', features Benjamin Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and Jay Farrar (Son Volt) performing songs based on Kerouac's Big Sur.

In 2010, during the first weekend of October, the 25th anniversary of the literary festival 'Lowell Celebrates Kerouac' was held in Kerouac's birthplace of Lowell, Massachusetts. It featured walking tours, literary seminars, and musical performances focused on Kerouac's work and that of the Beat Generation.

In the 2010s, there has been a surge in films based on the Beat Generation. Kerouac has been depicted in the films Howl and Kill Your Darlings. A feature film version of On the Road was released internationally in 2012, and was directed by Walter Salles and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Independent filmmaker Michael Polish directed Big Sur, based on the novel, with Jean-Marc Barr cast as Kerouac. The film was released in 2013.^[93][94]

A species of Indian platygastrid wasp that is phoretic (hitch-hiking) on grasshoppers is named after him as Mantibaria kerouaci.^[95]

Works[edit]

Poetry[edit]

While he is best known for his novels, Kerouac is also noted for his poetry. Kerouac said that he wanted 'to be considered as a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jazz session on Sunday.'.^[96] Many of Kerouac's poems follow the style of his free-flowing, uninhibited prose, also incorporating elements of jazz and Buddhism. 'Mexico City Blues,' a collection of poems published in 1959, is made up of 242 choruses following the rhythms of jazz. In much of his poetry, to achieve a jazz-like rhythm, Kerouac made use of the long dash in place of a period. Several examples of this can be seen in 'Mexico City Blues':

Everything
Is Ignorant of its own emptiness—
Anger
Doesnt like to be reminded of fits—

Other well-known poems by Kerouac, such as 'Bowery Blues,' incorporate jazz rhythms with Buddhist themes of Saṃsāra, the cycle of life and death, and Samadhi, the concentration of composing the mind.^[98] Also, following the jazz / blues tradition, Kerouac's poetry features repetition and themes of the troubles and sense of loss experienced in life.

Posthumous editions[edit]

In 2007, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publishing, Viking issued two new editions: On the Road: The Original Scroll, and On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition.^[99][100] By far the more significant is Scroll, a transcription of the original draft typed as one long paragraph on sheets of tracing paper which Kerouac taped together to form a 120-foot (37 m) scroll. The text is more sexually explicit than Viking allowed to be published in 1957, and also uses the real names of Kerouac's friends rather than the fictional names he later substituted. Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay paid $2.43 million for the original scroll and allowed an exhibition tour that concluded at the end of 2009. The other new issue, 50th Anniversary Edition, is a reissue of the 40th anniversary issue under an updated title.

The Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time on November 1, 2008 by Grove Press.^[101] Previously, a fragment of the manuscript had been published in the Burroughs compendium, Word Virus.^[102]

Les Éditions du Boréal, a Montreal-based publishing house, obtained rights from Kerouac's estate to publish a collection of works titled La vie est d'hommage (it was released in April 2016). It includes 16 previously unpublished works, in French, including a novella, Sur le chemin, La nuit est ma femme, and large sections of Maggie Cassidy originally written in French. Both Sur le chemin and La nuit est ma femme have also been translated to English by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, in collaboration with Kerouac, and were published in 2016 by the Library of America in The Unknown Kerouac.^[103][104]

Discography[edit]

Studio albums[edit]

• Poetry for the Beat Generation (with Steve Allen) (1959)
• Blues and Haikus (with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims) (1959)
• Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation (1960)

Compilation albums[edit]

• The Jack Kerouac Collection (1990) [Box] (Audio CD collection of three studio albums)
• Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road (1999)

See also[edit]

References[edit]

Notes[edit]

1. ^'Jack Kerouac'. biography.com.
2. ^'Kerouac'. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House.
3. ^Kerouac, Jack (June 1996). La nuit est ma femme (in La Nouvelle Revue Française). Editions Gallimard. ISBN207074521X. Retrieved December 22, 2016.
4. ^Kerouac, Jack (September 15, 2016). The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings. New York: The Library of America. ISBN978-159853-498-6. Retrieved December 22, 2016.
5. ^Ellis Béchard, Deni. 'On le Road: Kerouac's French-Canadian roots hold the key to his literary identity'. The Walrus. Retrieved December 22, 2016.
6. ^Pratte, Andre (November 8, 2016). Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America. Signal. ISBN978-0771072413. Retrieved December 22, 2016.
7. ^Swartz, Omar (1999). The view from on the road: the rhetorical vision of Jack Kerouac. Southern Illinois University Press. p. 4. ISBN978-0-8093-2384-5. Retrieved January 29, 2010.
8. ^Dean, Robert (September 7, 2012). 'The Conservative Kerouac'. The American Conservative. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
9. ^Martinez, Manuel Luis (2003), Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera, University of Wisconsin Press, p. 26, ISBN978-0-299-19284-6, Kerouac appeared to have done an about-face, becoming extraordinarily reactionary and staunchly anticommunist, vocalizing his intense hatred of the 1960s counterculture ..; id. at p. 29 ('Kerouac realized where his basic allegiance lay and vehemently disassociated himself from hippies and revolutionaries and deemed them unpatriotic subversives.'); id. at p. 30 ('Kerouac['s] .. attempt to play down any perceived responsibility on his part for the hippie generation, whose dangerous activism he found repellent and 'delinquent.'); id. at p. 111 ('Kerouac saw the hippies as mindless, communistic, rude, unpatriotic and soulless.'); Maher, Paul; Amram, David (2007), Kerouac: His Life and Work, Taylor Trade Publications, p. 469, ISBN9781589793668, In the current political climate, Kerouac wrote, he had nowhere to turn, as he liked neither the hippies .. nor the upper-echelon ..
10. ^Ann Charters, Samuel Charters, Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation, University Press of Mississippi, 2010, p. 113
11. ^ ^abNicosia 1983
12. ^ ^abDagier 2009
13. ^'genealogie.org'. Archived from the original on February 22, 2012.
14. ^Alan M Kent, Celtic Cornwall: Nation, Tradition, Invention. Halsgrove, 2012
15. ^Michael J. Dittman, Jack Kerouac: A Biography, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004
16. ^Berrigan, Ted (1968). 'The Art of Fiction No. 43: Jack Kerouac, pg. 49'(PDF). The Paris Review. Archived from the original(PDF) on May 28, 2008. Retrieved May 14, 2008.
17. ^Sandison 1999
18. ^ ^abcdeFellows, Mark The Apocalypse of Jack Kerouac: Meditations on the 30th Anniversary of his DeathArchived January 23, 2012, at WebCite, Culture Wars Magazine, November 1999
19. ^ ^ab'Jack Kerouac – bio and links'. Beatmuseum.org. Retrieved April 23, 2011.
20. ^Desmeules, Christian (April 2, 2016). 'L'autre Kerouac'. Le Devoir (in French). Retrieved April 13, 2019.
21. ^'La vie est d'hommage'. Éditions Boréal (in French). Retrieved April 26, 2016.
22. ^ ^abcAmburn, Ellis, Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac, p. 13-14 , MacMillan 1999
23. ^Miles 1998, p. 8
24. ^Berrigan 1968, p. 14
25. ^'Phi Gamma Delta'. Wiki CU. Retrieved July 19, 2011.
26. ^The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac's City. City Lights Books. 1997. ISBN978-0872863255. Retrieved July 23, 2011.
27. ^Johnson, Joyce (November 11, 2012). 'How the 'Beat Generation' Got Away from Kerouac'. HuffPost.
28. ^'Hit The Road, Jack'. The Smoking Gun. September 5, 2005. Retrieved April 29, 2008.
29. ^Bates, Stephen (November 25, 2011). 'Kerouac's Lost Debut Novel Published'. The Guardian. London. Retrieved December 6, 2011.
30. ^Knight 1996, pp. 78–79
31. ^Fenton, Patrick (1997). 'The wizard of Ozone Park'. Dharma Beat. Archived from the original on February 25, 2008. Retrieved May 27, 2008.
32. ^Kilgannon, Corey (November 10, 2005). 'On the Road, the One Called Cross Bay Boulevard'. The New York Times. Retrieved April 29, 2008.
33. ^'LITTLE SHOPPE OF FLOWERS' 'Ozone Park' Queens 'New York'. Google Maps. January 1, 1970. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
34. ^Wolf, Stephen (November 21–27, 2007). 'An epic journey through the life of Jack Kerouac'. The Villager. Archived from the original on July 6, 2008. Retrieved May 14, 2008.
35. ^Amburn, Ellis (October 5, 1999). Subterranean Kerouac: the hidden life of Jack Kerouac. ISBN9780312206772. Retrieved September 28, 2010.
36. ^ ^abSante, Luc (August 19, 2007). 'On the Road Again'. The New York Times. Retrieved May 10, 2008.
37. ^ ^abShea, Andrea (July 5, 2007). 'Jack Kerouac's Famous Scroll, 'On the Road' Again'. NPR. Retrieved April 29, 2008.
38. ^Charters, Ann. 'Jack Kerouac.' American Novelists Since World War II: First Series. Ed. Jeffrey Helterman and Richard Layman. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 2. Literature Resources from Gale. Gale. November 8, 2010.
39. ^'The Road to Rocky Mount'. newsobserver. Retrieved August 14, 2018.
40. ^'Jack Kerouac: All Roads Lead to Rocky Mount by Daniel Barth (pg 8)'. www.aceswebworld.com. Retrieved August 14, 2018.
41. ^'DHARMA beat - A Jack Kerouac Website'. www.dharmabeat.com. Retrieved August 14, 2018.
42. ^Vitale, Tom (September 1, 2007). ''On the Road' at 50'. NPR. Retrieved February 28, 2011.
43. ^Knight 1996, pp. 88
44. ^Dictionary of Literary Biography. 'Jan Kerouac Biography'. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Retrieved May 10, 2008.
45. ^Wake Up! on Amazon.com. ASIN0670019577.CS1 maint: ASIN uses ISBN (link)
46. ^Fisher, James Terence (2001). The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933–1962. UNC Press. pp. 216, 237. ISBN9780807849491.
47. ^'Books of the Times'. The New York Times. Retrieved October 24, 2012.
48. ^'Jack Kerouac Biography & Facts'. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved September 12, 2017.
49. ^'Beat Generation Elders Meet to Praise Kerouac'. The New York Times. Retrieved December 16, 2008.
50. ^'Jack Kerouac Obituary'. The New York Times.
51. ^Suiter 2002, p. 237
52. ^Berrigan 1968, pp. 19–20
53. ^ ^abSuiter 2002, p. 229
54. ^Suiter 2002, p. 233
55. ^Suiter 2002, pp. 242–243
56. ^Cohen, John (August 8, 2008). 'Is Pull My Daisy Holy?'. photo-eye Magazine. Retrieved September 13, 2013.
57. ^ ^abMills, Katie (2006). The Road Story and the Rebel; Moving Through FIlm, Fiction and television. IL, USA: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN9780809388172. Retrieved July 25, 2017.
58. ^'Jack Kerouac on The Steve Allen Plymouth Show (1959)'. November 13, 2008. Retrieved October 22, 2015.
59. ^Un dornad plu, Youenn Gwernig, Al Liamm, 1997, page 10.
60. ^Brinkley, Douglas, ed. Kerouac: Road Novels 1957–1960. New York: The Library of America, 2007. pp. 844–45.
61. ^'Digital Beats : Jack Kerouac'. Faculty.uml.edu. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
62. ^Larson, Jordan. 'What Hollywood Gets Wrong About Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation'. The Atlantic. Retrieved September 12, 2017.
63. ^Scheffler, Ian (September 6, 2013). 'Football and the Fall of Jack Kerouac'. The New Yorker. ISSN0028-792X. Retrieved September 12, 2017.
64. ^'Author Kerouac Dies; Led 'Beat Generation''. The Daily Collegian. October 22, 1969. Archived from the original on September 21, 2008. Retrieved April 29, 2008.^{[dead link]}
65. ^Kilgannon, Corey (December 31, 2006). 'For Kerouac, Off the Road and Deep into the Bottle, a Rest Stop on the Long Island Shore'. The New York Times. Retrieved December 23, 2008.
66. ^'Investigating the Death of Jack Kerouac'. May 13, 2011. Archived from the original on February 21, 2013. Retrieved February 16, 2012.
67. ^Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 25332). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
68. ^'Jack Kerouac Receives Posthumous Honorary Degree'. UMass Lowell. May 31, 2007. Retrieved March 13, 2015.
69. ^Hunt, Tim (2014). The textuality of soulwork : Jack Kerouac's quest for spontaneous prose. ISBN978-0-472-07216-3.
70. ^Suiter 2002, p. 186
71. ^Suiter 2002, p. 189
72. ^Suiter 2002, p. 228
73. ^'Kerouac on the Brink'. The Attic. Retrieved July 27, 2018.
74. ^Grobel, Lawrence (2000). Conversations with Capote. Da Capo Press. p. 32. ISBN0-306-80944-3.
75. ^Shea, Andrea. 'Jack Kerouac's Famous Scroll, 'On the Road' Again'. NPR. Retrieved July 20, 2017.
76. ^'Forthcoming from Library of America: Summer–Fall 2016 Library of America'. www.loa.org. Retrieved April 26, 2016.
77. ^'The sardonic pilgrimage of Jack Kerouac – Yannis Livadas'. emptymirrorbooks.com. September 22, 2016. Retrieved March 14, 2018.Italic or bold markup not allowed in: website= (help)
78. ^Cassady, Neal (1964). The First Third. Underground Press. p. 387. OCLC42789161.
79. ^Suiter 2002, p. 191
80. ^Suiter 2002, p. 210
81. ^To Be An Irishman Too: Kerouac's Irish Connection, p. 371, Studies: an Irish quarterly review, Volume 92, Talbot Press., 2003
82. ^ ^abBegnal, Michael, 'I Dig Joyce': Jack Kerouac and Finnegans Wake, Philological Quarterly, Spring 1998
83. ^Hemmer, Kurt, Encyclopedia of Beat Literature, p. 244, Infobase Publishing, 2007
84. ^Kerouac, Jack and Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, Penguin, 2010
85. ^Begnal, Michael (2003). ''To be an Irishman Too': Jack Kerouac's Irish Connection'. Irish Province of the Society of Jesus. 92 (368): 372. JSTOR30095661.
86. ^'Jack Kerouac Biography Jack Kerouac.' Jack Kerouac. UMass Lowell, 2014. Web. April 29, 2014.
87. ^'Song Meanings'. 1999–2019. Retrieved June 2, 2019.CS1 maint: date format (link)
88. ^'The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics'. Naropa University. Retrieved May 10, 2008.
89. ^Lawlor, William (May 20, 2005). Beat Culture: Lifestyles, Icons, and Impact. ABC-CLIO. p. 109. ISBN978-1-85109-400-4.
90. ^Marion, Paul (1999). Atop an Underwood. Penguin Group. p. xxi.
91. ^'Kerouac' (in French). Ville de Lanmeur. Retrieved April 17, 2017.
92. ^'UMass Lowell Honors Jack Kerouac, U.S. Rep. John Lewis'. University of Massachusetts. May 23, 2007. Retrieved April 29, 2008.
93. ^Brooks, Xan (April 18, 2011). 'Jack Kerouac's Big Sur heads to the big screen'. The Guardian. London.
94. ^Thornton, Stuart (June 16, 2011). 'Jack Kerouac's 'Big Sur' gets the Hollywood treatment from Kate Bosworth and company. – Monterey County Weekly: Movies'. Monterey County Weekly. Archived from the original on September 9, 2012. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
95. ^Veenakumari, K.; Rajmohana, K.; Prashanth, M. (2012). 'Studies on phoretic Scelioninae (Hymenoptera: Platygastridae) from India along with description of a new species of Mantibaria Kirby'(PDF). Linzer biol. Beitr. 44 (2): 1715–1725.
96. ^'Jack Kerouac- Poets.org – Poetry, Poems, Bios & More'. Poets.org. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
97. ^Kerouac, Jack (1959). Mexico City Blues (242 Choruses). Grove Press. p. 113.
98. ^'Bowery Blues by Jack Kerouac'. Poemhunter.com. May 4, 2012. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
99. ^'Uncensored 'On the Road' to be published'. MSNBC. July 26, 2006. Retrieved April 29, 2008.
100. ^Bignell, Paul; Johnson, Andrew (July 29, 2007). 'On the Road (uncensored). Discovered: Kerouac 'cuts''. The Independent. London. Retrieved April 29, 2008.
101. ^'New Kerouac-Burroughs book due out'. United Press International. March 2, 2008. Retrieved April 29, 2008.^{[permanent dead link]}
102. ^Burroughs, William (1998). Word virus. Grove Press. p. 576. ISBN0-8021-1629-9.
103. ^'Jack Kerouac's rare French novels to be released by Canadian publishers'. CBC/Radio-Canada. February 11, 2015. Retrieved February 15, 2015.
104. ^'Unpublished Jack Kerouac writings to be released'. Relaxnews. CTV News. February 11, 2015. Retrieved February 15, 2015.

Sources[edit]

• Berrigan, Ted (Summer 1968). 'Jack Kerouac, The Art of Fiction No. 41'. The Paris Review.
• Dagier, Patricia (2009). Jack Kerouac, Breton d'Amérique. Editions Le Télégramme.
• Knight, Brenda (1996). Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. Conari Press. ISBN1-57324-138-5.
• Miles, Barry (1998). Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats. Virgin.
• Nicosia, Gerald (1994). Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN0-520-08569-8.
• Sandison, David (1999). Jack Kerouac. Hamlyn.
• Suiter, John (2002). Poets on the Peaks Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades. Counterpoint. ISBN1-58243-148-5.

Further reading[edit]

• Amburm, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. St. Martin's Press, 1999. ISBN0-312-20677-1
• Amram, David. Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac. Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002. ISBN1-56025-362-2
• Bartlett, Lee (ed.) The Beats: Essays in Criticism. London: McFarland, 1981.
• Beaulieu, Victor-Lévy. Jack Kerouac: A Chicken Essay. Coach House Press, 1975.
• Brooks, Ken. The Jack Kerouac Digest. Agenda, 2001.
• Cassady, Carolyn. Neal Cassady Collected Letters, 1944–1967. Penguin, 2004. ISBN0-14-200217-8
• Cassady, Carolyn. Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg. Black Spring Press, 1990.
• Challis, Chris. Quest for Kerouac. Faber & Faber, 1984.
• Charters, Ann. Kerouac. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973.
• Charters, Ann (ed.) The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin, 1992.
• Charters, Ann (ed.) The Portable Jack Kerouac. New York: Penguin, 1995.
• Christy, Jim. The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac. ECW Press, 1998.
• Chiasson, Herménégilde (1987). 'Jack Kerouac's Road – A Franco-American Odyssey'. Online documentary. National Film Board of Canada. Retrieved October 25, 2011.
• Clark, Tom. Jack Kerouac. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984.
• Coolidge, Clark. Now It's Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & the Sounds. Living Batch, 1999.
• Collins, Ronald & Skover, David. Mania: The Story of the Outraged & Outrageous Lives that Launched a Cultural Revolution (Top-Five Books, March 2013)
• Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971. ISBN0-684-12371-1
• Dagier, Patricia (1999). Jack Kerouac: Au Bout de la Route .. La Bretagne. An Here.
• Dale, Rick. The Beat Handbook: 100 Days of Kerouactions. Booksurge, 2008.
• Edington, Stephen. Kerouac's Nashua Roots. Transition, 1999.
• Ellis, R.J., Liar! Liar! Jack Kerouac – Novelist. Greenwich Exchange, 1999.
• French, Warren. Jack Kerouac. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.
• Gaffié, Luc. Jack Kerouac: The New Picaroon. Postillion Press, 1975.
• Giamo, Ben. Kerouac, The Word and The Way. Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.
• Gifford, Barry. Kerouac's Town. Creative Arts, 1977.
• Gifford, Barry; Lee, Lawrence. Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. St. Martin's Press, 1978. ISBN0-14-005269-0
• Grace, Nancy M. Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination. Palgrave-macmillan, 2007.
• Goldstein, N.W., 'Kerouac's On the Road'. Explicator 50.1. 1991.
• Haynes, Sarah, 'An Exploration of Jack Kerouac's Buddhism:Text and Life'
• Hemmer, Kurt. Encyclopedia of Beat Literature: The Essential Guide to the Lives and Works of the Beat Writers. Facts on File, Inc., 2007.
• Hipkiss, Robert A., Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism. Regents Press, 1976.
• Holmes, John Clellon. Visitor: Jack Kerouac in Old Saybrook. tuvoti, 1981.
• Holmes, John Clellon. Gone In October: Last Reflections on Jack Kerouac. Limberlost, 1985.
• Holton, Robert. On the Road: Kerouac's Ragged American Journey. Twayne, 1999.
• Hrebeniak, Michael. Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form. Carbondale IL., Southern Illinois UP, 2006.
• Huebel, Harry Russell. Jack Kerouac. Boise State University, 1979.available online
• Hunt, Tim. Kerouac's Crooked Road. Hamden: Archon Books, 1981.
• Jarvis, Charles. Visions of Kerouac. Ithaca Press, 1973.
• Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters: A Young Woman's Coming-Of-Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac. Penguin Books, 1999.
• Johnson, Joyce. Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957–1958. Viking, 2000.
• Johnson, Ronna C., 'You're Putting Me On: Jack Kerouac and the Postmodern Emergence'. College Literature. 27.1 2000.
• Jones, James T., A Map of Mexico City Blues: Jack Kerouac as Poet. Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.
• Jones, James T., Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.
• Jones, Jim. Use My Name: Kerouac's Forgotten Families. ECW Press, 1999.
• Jones, Jim. Jack Kerouac's Nine Lives. Elbow/Cityful Press, 2001.
• Kealing, Bob. Kerouac in Florida: Where the Road Ends. Arbiter Press, 2004.
• Kerouac, Joan Haverty. Nobody's Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats. Creative Arts, 2000.
• Landefeld, Kurt. Jack's Memoirs: Off the Road, A Novel. Bottom Dog Press, 2014.
• Le Bihan, Adrien. Mon frère, Jack Kerouac, Le temps qu'il fait, 2018. (ISBN9782868536341)
• Leland, John. Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think). New York: Viking Press, 2007. ISBN978-0-670-06325-3.
• Maher Jr., Paul. Kerouac: His Life and Work. Lanham: Taylor Trade P, July 2004 ISBN0-87833-305-3
• McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. Da Capo Press, 2003. ISBN0-306-81222-3
• Montgomery, John. Jack Kerouac: A Memoir .. Giligia Press, 1970.
• Montgomery, John. Kerouac West Coast. Fels & Firn Press, 1976.
• Montgomery, John. The Kerouac We Knew. Fels & Firn Press, 1982.
• Montgomery, John. Kerouac at the Wild Boar. Fels & Firn Press, 1986.
• Mortenson, Erik R., 'Beating Time: Configurations of Temporality in Jack Kerouac's On the Road'. College Literature 28.3. 2001.
• Motier, Donald. Gerard: The Influence of Jack Kerouac's Brother on his Life and Writing. Beaulieu Street Press, 1991.
• Nelson, Victoria. 'Dark Journey into Light: On the Road with Jack Kerouac'. Saint Austin Review (November/December 2014).
• Nicosia, Gerald. 'Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century' Noodlebrain Press, 2019.
• Nicosia, Gerald. 'Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac' Grove Press, 1983.
• Nicosia, Gerald. 'One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road' Viva Editions, 2011.
• Parker, Brad. 'Jack Kerouac: An Introduction'. Lowell Corporation for the Humanities, 1989.
• Swick, Thomas. South Florida Sun Sentinel. February 22, 2004. Article: 'Jack Kerouac in Orlando'.
• Theado, Matt. Understanding Jack Kerouac. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2000.
• Turner, Steve. Angelheaded Hipster: A Life of Jack Kerouac. Viking Books, 1996. ISBN0-670-87038-2
• Walsh, Joy, editor. Moody Street Irregulars: A Jack Kerouac Newsletter
• Weaver, Helen. The Awakener: A Memoir of Jack Kerouac and the Fifties. City Lights, 2009. ISBN978-0-87286-505-1. OCLC318876929.
• Weinreich, Regina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac. Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
• Wills, David, editor. Beatdom Magazine. Mauling Press, 2007.

External links[edit]

• Kerouac.net—An introduction to the life and work of Jack Kerouac, and the deep impact he had on our society and culture.
• JackKerouac.com – The Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for the Public Humanities's website is an interactive storehouse and exhibition space dedicated to Jack Kerouac and connected topics.
• Jack Kerouac on IMDb
• Jack Kerouac at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Jack Kerouac at Curlie
• Jack Kerouac Papers at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University
• Jack Kerouac Papers, 1920–1977, held by the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library
• 'Writings of Jack Kerouac' from C-SPAN's American Writers: A Journey Through History
• The Kerouac Companion—The definitive key to the 600+ characters in Kerouac's novels.

On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel, published in 1957, is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx) and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator Sal Paradise.

The idea for On the Road, Kerouac's second novel, was formed during the late 1940s in a series of notebooks, and then typed out on a continuous reel of paper during three weeks in April 1951. It was first published by Viking Press in 1957.

When the book was originally released, The New York Times hailed it as 'the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is.'^[1] In 1998, the Modern Library ranked On the Road 55th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.^[2]

• 2Plot
• 3Reception

Production and publication[edit]

After Kerouac dropped out of Columbia University, he served on several different sailing vessels before returning to New York to write. He met and mixed with Beat Generation figures Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Between 1947 and 1950, while writing what would become The Town and the City (1950), Kerouac engaged in the road adventures that would form On the Road.^[3] Kerouac carried small notebooks, in which much of the text was written as the eventful span of road trips unfurled. He started working on the first of several versions of the novel as early as 1948, based on experiences during his first long road trip in 1947. However, he remained dissatisfied with the novel.^[4] Inspired by a 10,000-word rambling letter from his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac in 1950 outlined the 'Essentials of Spontaneous Prose' and decided to tell the story of his years on the road with Cassady as if writing a letter to a friend in a form that reflected the improvisational fluidity of jazz.^[5] In a letter to a student in 1961, Kerouac wrote: 'Dean and I were embarked on a journey through post-Whitman America to FIND that America and to FIND the inherent goodness in American man. It was really a story about 2 Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him.'^[6]

The first draft of what was to become the published novel was written in three weeks in April 1951, while Kerouac lived with Joan Haverty, his second wife, at 454 West 20th Street in New York City's Manhattan. The manuscript was typed on what he called 'the scroll'—a continuous, 120-foot scroll of tracing paper sheets that he cut to size and taped together.^[7] The roll was typed single-spaced, without margins or paragraph breaks. In the following years, Kerouac continued to revise this manuscript, deleting some sections (including some sexual depictions deemed pornographic in the 1950s) and adding smaller literary passages.^[8] Kerouac wrote a number of inserts intended for On the Road between 1951 and 1952, before eventually omitting them from the manuscript and using them to form the basis of another work, Visions of Cody (1951–1952).^[9]On the Road was championed within Viking Press by Malcolm Cowley and was published by Viking in 1957, based on revisions of the 1951 manuscript.^[10] Besides differences in formatting, the published novel was shorter than the original scroll manuscript and used pseudonyms for all of the major characters.

Viking Press released a slightly edited version of the original manuscript titled On the Road: The Original Scroll (August 16, 2007), corresponding with the 50th anniversary of original publication. This version has been transcribed and edited by English academic and novelist Dr. Howard Cunnell. As well as containing material that was excised from the original draft due to its explicit nature, the scroll version also uses the real names of the protagonists, so Dean Moriarty becomes Neal Cassady and Carlo Marx becomes Allen Ginsberg, etc.^[11]

In 2007, Gabriel Anctil, a journalist of Montreal daily Le Devoir, discovered in Kerouac's personal archives in New York almost 200 pages of his writings entirely in Quebec French, with colloquialisms. The collection included 10 manuscript pages of an unfinished version of On the Road, written on January 19, 1951. The date of the writings makes Kerouac one of the earliest known authors to use colloquial Quebec French in literature.^[12]

The original scroll of On The Road was bought in 2001 by Jim Irsay for $2.43 million (equivalent to $3.44 million in 2018). It has occasionally been made available for public viewing, with the first 30 feet (9 m) unrolled. Between 2004 and 2012, the scroll was displayed in several museums and libraries in the United States, Ireland, and the UK. It was exhibited in Paris in the summer of 2012 to celebrate the movie based on the book.^[13]

Plot[edit]

The two main characters of the book are the narrator, Sal Paradise, and his friend Dean Moriarty, much admired for his carefree attitude and sense of adventure, a free-spirited maverick eager to explore all kicks and an inspiration and catalyst for Sal's travels. The novel contains five parts, three of them describing road trips with Moriarty. The narrative takes place in the years 1947 to 1950, is full of Americana, and marks a specific era in jazz history, 'somewhere between its Charlie ParkerOrnithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis.' The novel is largely autobiographical, Sal being the alter ego of the author and Dean standing for Neal Cassady.

Part One[edit]

The first section describes Sal's first trip to San Francisco. Disheartened after a divorce, his life changes when he meets Dean Moriarty, who is 'tremendously excited with life,' and begins to long for the freedom of the road: 'Somewhere along the line I knew there would be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.' He sets off in July 1947 with fifty dollars in his pocket. After taking several buses and hitchhiking, he arrives in Denver, where he hooks up with Carlo Marx, Dean, and their friends. There are parties—among them an excursion to the ghost town of Central City. Eventually Sal leaves by bus and gets to San Francisco, where he meets Remi Boncoeur and his girlfriend Lee Ann. Remi arranges for Sal to take a job as a night watchman at a boarding camp for merchant sailors waiting for their ship. Not holding this job for long, Sal hits the road again. 'Oh, where is the girl I love?' he wonders. Soon he meets Terry, the 'cutest little Mexican girl,' on the bus to Los Angeles. They stay together, traveling back to Bakersfield, then to Sabinal, 'her hometown,' where her family works in the fields. He meets Terry's brother Ricky, who teaches him the true meaning of 'mañana' ('tomorrow'). Working in the cotton fields, Sal realizes that he is not made for this type of work. Leaving Terry behind, he takes the bus back to Times Square in New York City, bums a quarter off a preacher who looks the other way, and arrives at his aunt's house in Paterson, just missing Dean, who had come to see him, by two days.

Part Two[edit]

In December 1948 Sal is celebrating Christmas with his relatives in Testament, Virginia, when Dean shows up with Marylou (having left his second wife, Camille, and their newborn baby, Amy, in San Francisco) and Ed Dunkel. Sal's Christmas plans are shattered as 'now the bug was on me again, and the bug's name was Dean Moriarty.' First they drive to New York, where they meet Carlo and party. Dean wants Sal to make love to Marylou, but Sal declines. In Dean's Hudson they take off from New York in January 1949 and make it to New Orleans. In Algiers they stay with the morphine-addicted Old Bull Lee and his wife Jane. Galatea Dunkel joins her husband in New Orleans while Sal, Dean, and Marylou continue their trip. Once in San Francisco, Dean again leaves Marylou to be with Camille. 'Dean will leave you out in the cold anytime it is in the interest of him,' Marylou tells Sal. Both of them stay briefly in a hotel, but soon she moves out, following a nightclub owner. Sal is alone and on Market Street has visions of past lives, birth, and rebirth. Dean finds him and invites him to stay with his family. Together, they visit nightclubs and listen to Slim Gaillard and other jazz musicians. The stay ends on a sour note: 'what I accomplished by coming to Frisco I don't know,' and Sal departs, taking the bus back to New York.

Part Three[edit]

In the spring of 1949, Sal takes a bus from New York to Denver. He is depressed and lonesome; none of his friends are around. After receiving some money, he leaves Denver for San Francisco to see Dean. Camille is pregnant and unhappy, and Dean has injured his thumb trying to hit Marylou for sleeping with other men. Camille throws them out, and Sal invites Dean to come to New York, planning to travel further to Italy. They meet Galatea, who tells Dean off: 'You have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your kicks.' Sal realizes she is right—Dean is the 'HOLY GOOF'—but also defends him, as 'he's got the secret that we're all busting to find out.' After a night of jazz and drinking in Little Harlem on Folsom Street, they depart. On the way to Sacramento they meet a 'fag', who propositions them. Dean tries to hustle some money out of this but is turned down. During this part of the trip Sal and Dean have ecstatic discussions having found 'IT' and 'TIME'. In Denver a brief argument shows the growing rift between the two, when Dean reminds Sal of his age, Sal being the older of the two. They get a 1947 Cadillac that needs to be brought to Chicago from a travel bureau. Dean drives most of the way, crazy, careless, often speeding at over one hundred miles per hour (160 km/h), delivering the car in a disheveled state. By bus they move on to Detroit and spend a night on Skid Row, Dean hoping to find his homeless father. From Detroit they share a ride to New York and arrive at Sal's aunt's new flat in Long Island. They go on partying in New York, where Dean meets Inez and gets her pregnant while his wife is expecting their second child.

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Part Four[edit]

In the spring of 1950, Sal gets the itch to travel again while Dean is working as a parking lot attendant in Manhattan, living with his girlfriend Inez. Sal notices that he has been reduced to simple pleasures—listening to basketball games and looking at erotic playing cards. By bus Sal takes to the road again, passing Washington, D.C., Ashland, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, and eventually reaching Denver. There he meets Stan Shephard, and the two plan to go to Mexico City when they learn that Dean has bought a car and is on the way to join them. In a rickety '37 Ford sedan the three set off across Texas to Laredo, where they cross the border. They are ecstatic, having left 'everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things.' Their money buys more (10 cents for a beer), police are laid back, cannabis is readily available, and people are curious and friendly. The landscape is magnificent. In Gregoria, they meet Victor, a local kid, who leads them to a bordello where they have their last grand party, dancing to mambo, drinking, and having fun with prostitutes. In Mexico City Sal becomes ill from dysentery and is 'delirious and unconscious.' Dean leaves him, and Sal later reflects that 'when I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.'

Part Five[edit]

Dean, having obtained divorce papers in Mexico, had first returned to New York to marry Inez, only to leave her and go back to Camille. After his recovery from dysentery in Mexico, Sal returns to New York in the fall. He finds a girl, Laura, and plans to move with her to San Francisco. Sal writes to Dean about his plan to move to San Francisco. Dean writes back saying that he's willing to come and accompany Laura and Sal. Dean arrives over five weeks early, but Sal is out taking a late-night walk alone. Sal returns home, sees a copy of Proust, and knows it is Dean's. Sal realizes his friend has arrived, but at a time when Sal doesn't have the money to relocate to San Francisco. On hearing this Dean makes the decision to head back to Camille. Sal's friend Remi Boncoeur denies Sal's request to give Dean a short lift to 40th Street on their way to a Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera House. Sal's girlfriend Laura realizes this is a painful moment for Sal and prompts him for a response as the party drives off without Dean. Sal replies: 'He'll be alright'. Sal later reflects as he sits on a river pier under a New Jersey night sky about the roads and lands of America that he has travelled and states: '.. I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.'

Characters[edit]

Kerouac often based his fictional characters on friends and family.^[14][15]

Because of the objections of my early publishers I was not allowed to use the same personae names in each work.^[16]

Reception[edit]

The book received a mixed reaction from the media in 1957. Some of the earlier reviews spoke highly of the book, but the backlash to these was swift and strong. Although this was discouraging to Kerouac, he still received great recognition and notoriety from the work. Since its publication, critical attention has focused on issues of both the context and the style, addressing the actions of the characters as well as the nature of Kerouac's prose.

Initial reaction[edit]

In his review for The New York Times, Gilbert Millstein wrote, 'its publication is a historic occasion in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion' and praised it as 'a major novel.'^[1] Millstein was already sympathetic toward the Beat Generation and his promotion of the book in the Times did wonders for its recognition and acclaim. Not only did he like the themes, but also the style, which would come to be just as hotly contested in the reviews that followed. 'There are sections of On the Road in which the writing is of a beauty almost breathtaking .. there is some writing on jazz that has never been equaled in American fiction, either for insight, style, or technical virtuosity.'^[1] Kerouac and Joyce Johnson, a younger writer he was living with, read the review shortly after midnight at a newsstand at 69th Street and Broadway, near Joyce's apartment in the Upper West Side. They took their copy of the newspaper to a neighborhood bar and read the review over and over. 'Jack kept shaking his head,' Joyce remembered later in her memoir Minor Characters, 'as if he couldn't figure out why he wasn't happier than he was.' Finally, they returned to her apartment to go to sleep. As Joyce recalled: 'Jack lay down obscure for the last time in his life. The ringing phone woke him the next morning, and he was famous.'^[17]

The backlash began just a few days later in the same publication. David Dempsey published a review that contradicted most of what Millstein had promoted in the book. 'As a portrait of a disjointed segment of society acting out of its own neurotic necessity, On the Road, is a stunning achievement. But it is a road, as far as the characters are concerned, that leads to nowhere.' While he did not discount the stylistic nature of the text (saying that it was written 'with great relish'), he dismissed the content as a 'passionate lark' rather than a novel.'^[18]

Other reviewers were also less than impressed. Phoebe Lou Adams in Atlantic Monthly wrote that it 'disappoints because it constantly promises a revelation or a conclusion of real importance and general applicability, and cannot deliver any such conclusion because Dean is more convincing as an eccentric than as a representative of any segment of humanity.'^[19] While she liked the writing and found a good theme, her concern was repetition. 'Everything Mr. Kerouac has to say about Dean has been told in the first third of the book, and what comes later is a series of variations on the same theme.'^[19]

The review from Time exhibited a similar sentiment. 'The post-World War II generation—beat or beatific—has not found symbolic spokesmen with anywhere near the talents of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Nathanael West. In this novel, talented Author Kerouac, 35, does not join that literary league, either, but at least suggests that his generation is not silent. With his barbaric yawp of a book, Kerouac commands attention as a kind of literary James Dean.'^[20] It considers the book partly a travel book and partly a collection of journal jottings. While Kerouac sees his characters as 'mad to live .. desirous of everything at the same time,' the reviewer likens them to cases of 'psychosis that is a variety of Ganser Syndrome' who 'aren't really mad—they only seem to be.'^[20]

Critical study[edit]

Thomas Pynchon describes On The Road as 'one of the great American novels'.^[21]

On the Road has been the object of critical study since its publication. David Brooks of The New York Times compiled several opinions and summarized them in an Op-Ed from October 2, 2007. Whereas Millstein saw it as a story in which the heroes took pleasure in everything, George Mouratidis, an editor of a new edition, claimed 'above all else, the story is about loss.' 'It's a book about death and the search for something meaningful to hold on to—the famous search for 'IT,' a truth larger than the self, which, of course, is never found,' wrote Meghan O'Rourke in Slate. 'Kerouac was this deep, lonely, melancholy man,' Hilary Holladay of the University of Massachusetts Lowell told The Philadelphia Inquirer. 'And if you read the book closely, you see that sense of loss and sorrow swelling on every page.' 'In truth, 'On the Road' is a book of broken dreams and failed plans,' wrote Ted Gioia in The Weekly Standard.^[22]

John Leland, author of Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think), says 'We're no longer shocked by the sex and drugs. The slang is passé and at times corny. Some of the racial sentimentality is appalling' but adds 'the tale of passionate friendship and the search for revelation are timeless. These are as elusive and precious in our time as in Sal's, and will be when our grandchildren celebrate the book's hundredth anniversary.'^[23]

To Brooks, this characterization seems limited. 'Reading through the anniversary commemorations, you feel the gravitational pull of the great Boomer Narcissus. All cultural artifacts have to be interpreted through whatever experiences the Baby Boomer generation is going through at that moment. So a book formerly known for its youthful exuberance now becomes a gloomy middle-aged disillusion.'^[22] He laments how the book's spirit seems to have been tamed by the professionalism of America today and how it has only survived in parts. The more reckless and youthful parts of the text that gave it its energy are the parts that have 'run afoul of the new gentility, the rules laid down by the health experts, childcare experts, guidance counselors, safety advisers, admissions officers, virtuecrats and employers to regulate the lives of the young.'^[22] He claims that the 'ethos' of the book has been lost.

Mary Pannicia Carden feels that traveling was a way for the characters to assert their independence: they 'attempt to replace the model of manhood dominant in capitalist America with a model rooted in foundational American ideals of conquest and self-discovery.'^[24] 'Reassigning disempowering elements of patriarchy to female keeping, they attempt to substitute male brotherhood for the nuclear family and to replace the ladder of success with the freedom of the road as primary measures of male identity.'^[24]

Kerouac's writing style has attracted the attention of critics. On the Road has been considered by Tim Hunt to be a transitional phase between the traditional narrative structure of The Town and the City (1951) and the 'wild form' of his later books like Visions of Cody (1972).^[25] Kerouac's own explanation of his style in 'Essentials of Spontaneous Prose' (1953) is that his writing is like the Impressionist painters who sought to create art through direct observation. Matt Theado feels he endeavored to present a raw version of truth which did not lend itself to the traditional process of revision and rewriting but rather the emotionally charged practice of the spontaneity he pursued.^[26] Theado argues that the personal nature of the text helps foster a direct link between Kerouac and the reader; that his casual diction and very relaxed syntax was an intentional attempt to depict events as they happened and to convey all of the energy and emotion of the experiences.^[26]

Music in On the Road[edit]

Jack Kerouac Poetry

Music is an important part of the scene that Kerouac sets in On the Road. Early in the book (Pt. 1, Ch. 3), he establishes the time period with references to the musical world: 'At this time, 1947, bop was going like mad all over America. The fellows at the Loop blew, but with a tired air, because bop was somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis. And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of all my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about.'

Main characters Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty are clearly enthusiastic fans of the jazz/bebop and early rhythm-and-blues musicians and records that were in the musical mix during the years when story took place, 1947-50. Sal, Dean, and their friends are repeatedly depicted listening to specific records and going to clubs to hear their musical favorites.

For example, in one of two separate passages where they go to clubs to hear British jazz pianist George Shearing, the effect of the music is described as almost overwhelming for Dean (Pt. 2, Ch. 4): 'Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you'd think the man wouldn't have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to 'Go!' Dean was sweating; the sweat poured down his collar. 'There he is! That's him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!' And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean's gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn't see. 'That's right!' Dean said. 'Yes!' Shearing smiled; he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial. When he was gone Dean pointed to the empty piano seat. 'God's empty chair,' he said.'

Kerouac mentions many other musical artists and their records throughout On the Road: Charlie Parker – 'Ornithology' (Pt. 1, Ch. 3; also Pt. 3, Ch. 10); Lionel Hampton – 'Central Avenue Breakdown' (Pt. 1, Ch. 13; also Pt. 4, Ch. 4); Billie Holiday – 'Lover Man' (Pt.1, Ch. 13; also Pt. 3, Ch. 4); Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray – 'The Hunt' (Pt. 2, Ch. 1; Pt. 2, Ch. 4); Dizzy Gillespie – 'Congo Blues' (Pt. 3, Ch. 7 – recorded under Red Norvo's name and also featuring Charlie Parker; also Pt. 3, Ch. 10; Pt. 4, Ch. 3); Willis Jackson – 'Gator Tail' (Pt. 4, Ch. 1 – recorded with the Cootie Williams Orchestra); Wynonie Harris – 'I Like My Baby's Pudding' (Pt. 4, Ch. 4); and Perez Prado -- 'More Mambo Jambo,' 'Chattanooga de Mambo,' 'Mambo Numero Ocho' ('Mambo No. 8') (Pt. 4, Ch. 5).

Kerouac also notes several other musical artists without mentioning specific records: Miles Davis (Pt. 1, Ch. 3; Pt. 3, Ch. 10); George Shearing and his drummer Denzil Best (Pt. 2, Ch. 4; Pt. 3, Ch. 10); Slim Gaillard (Pt. 2, Ch. 11); Lester Young (Pt. 3, Ch. 10; Pt. 4, Ch. 1); Louis Armstrong (Pt. 3, Ch. 10); Roy Eldridge (Pt. 3, Ch. 10); Count Basie (Pt. 3, Ch. 10); Bennie Moten (Pt. 3, Ch. 10); Hot Lips Page (Pt. 3, Ch. 10); Thelonious Monk (Pt. 3, Ch. 10); Anita O'Day (Pt. 3, Ch. 10); Stan Getz (Pt. 4, Ch. 1); Lucky Millinder (Pt. 4, Ch. 4); and Duke Ellington (Pt. 5).

Jazz and other types of music are also featured more generally as a backdrop, with the characters often listening to music in clubs or on the radio. For example, while driving across the upper Midwest toward New York City, Sal mentions that he and Dean are listening to the radio show of well-known jazz deejay Symphony Sid Torin (Pt. 3, Ch. 11).

Kerouac even delves into the classical music genre briefly, having Sal attend a performance of Beethoven's sole opera, Fidelio (1805), in Central City, Colorado, as performed by 'stars of the Metropolitan' who are visiting the area for the summer (Pt. 1, Ch. 9).

Influence[edit]

On the Road has been an influence on various poets, writers, actors and musicians, including Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Noel Gallagher, Jim Morrison, Jerry Garcia, David Bowie and Hunter S. Thompson.

From journalist Sean O'Hagan, in a 2007 article published in The Guardian:

'It changed my life like it changed everyone else's,' Dylan would say many years later. Tom Waits, too, acknowledged its influence, hymning Jack and Neal in a song and calling the Beats 'father figures.' At least two great American photographers were influenced by Kerouac: Robert Frank, who became his close friend—Kerouac wrote the introduction to Frank's book, The Americans—and Stephen Shore, who set out on an American road trip in the 1970s with Kerouac's book as a guide. It would be hard to imagine Hunter S. Thompson's road novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had On the Road not laid down the template; likewise, films such as Easy Rider,Paris, Texas, and even Thelma and Louise.^[27]

In his book Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors,Ray Manzarek (keyboard player of The Doors) wrote 'I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed.'

On the Road influenced an entire generation of musicians, poets, and writers including Allen Ginsberg. Because of Ginsberg's friendship with Kerouac, Ginsberg was written into the novel through the character Carlo Marx. Ginsberg recalled that he was attracted to the beat generation, and Kerouac, because the beats valued 'detachment from the existing society,' while at the same time calling for an immediate release from a culture in which the most 'freely' accessible items—bodies and ideas—seemed restricted (1). Ginsberg incorporated a sense of freedom of prose and style into his poetry as a result of the influence of Kerouac (1).^[28]

Film adaptation[edit]

A film adaptation of On the Road had been proposed in 1957 when Jack Kerouac wrote a one-page letter to actor Marlon Brando, suggesting that he play Dean Moriarty while Kerouac would portray Sal Paradise.^[29] Brando never responded to the letter; later on Warner Bros. offered $110,000 for the rights to Kerouac's book, but his agent, Sterling Lord, declined it, hoping for a $150,000 deal from Paramount Pictures, which did not occur.^[29]

The film rights were bought in 1980 by producer Francis Ford Coppola for $95,000.^[30] Coppola tried out several screenwriters, including Michael Herr, Barry Gifford, and novelist Russell Banks, even writing a draft himself with his son Roman, before settling on José Rivera.^[31][32] Several different plans were considered: Joel Schumacher as director, with Billy Crudup as Sal Paradise, and Colin Farrell as Dean Moriarty; then Ethan Hawke as Paradise and Brad Pitt as Moriarty; in 1995, he planned to shoot on black-and-white 16mm film and held auditions with poet Allen Ginsberg in attendance, but all those projects fell through.^[32]

After seeing Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), Coppola appointed Salles to direct the movie.^[33] In preparation for the film, Salles traveled the United States, tracing Kerouac's journey and filming a documentary on the search for On the Road.^[34]Sam Riley starred as Sal Paradise. Garrett Hedlund portrayed Dean Moriarty.^[34]Kristen Stewart played Mary Lou.^[35]Kirsten Dunst portrayed Camille.^[36] The film screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012^[37] and was nominated for the Palme d'Or.^[38]

In 2007, BBC Four aired Russell Brand On the Road, a documentary presented by Russell Brand and Matt Morgan about Kerouac, focusing on On the Road. The documentary American Road, which explores the mystique of the road in US culture and contains an ample section on Kerouac, premiered at the AMFM Festival in California on 14 June 2013, when it won the award for Best Documentary.^[39]

Beat Generation[edit]

While many critics still consider the word 'beat' in its literal sense of 'tired and beaten down,' others, including Kerouac himself promoted the generation more in sense of 'beatific' or blissful.^[40] Holmes and Kerouac published several articles in popular magazines in an attempt to explain the movement. In the November 16, 1952 New York Times Sunday Magazine, he wrote a piece exposing the faces of the Beat Generation. '[O]ne day [Kerouac] said, 'You know, this is a really beat generation' .. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and ultimately, of soul: a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself.'^[41] He distinguishes Beats from the Lost Generation of the 1920s pointing out how the Beats are not lost but how they are searching for answers to all of life's questions. Kerouac's preoccupation with writers like Ernest Hemingway shaped his view of the beat generation. He uses a prose style which he adapted from Hemingway and throughout On the Road he alludes to novels like The Sun Also Rises. 'How to live seems much more crucial than why.'^[41] In many ways, it is a spiritual journey, a quest to find belief, belonging, and meaning in life. Not content with the uniformity promoted by government and consumer culture, the Beats yearned for a deeper, more sensational experience. Holmes expands his attempt to define the generation in a 1958 article in Esquire magazine. This article was able to take more of a look back at the formation of the movement as it was published after On the Road. 'It describes the state of mind from which all unessentials have been stripped, leaving it receptive to everything around it, but impatient with trivial obstructions. To be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality, looking up.'^[42]

See also[edit]

• Off the Road (1990 book by Carolyn Cassady)

References[edit]

1. ^ ^abcGilbert Millstein (5 September 1957). 'Books of the Times'(PDF). The New York Times.
2. ^'ALL-TIME 100 Novels: The Complete List'. TIME Magazine. 2005.
3. ^Ann Charters (2003). Introduction to On the Road. New York: Penguin Classics.
4. ^Brinkley, Douglas (November 1998). 'In the Kerouac Archive'. Atlantic Monthly. pp. 49–76.
5. ^Charters, Ann (1973). Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books.
6. ^John Leland (2007). Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think). New York: Viking. p. 17.
7. ^Nicosia, Gerald (1994). Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Berkeley: University of California Press.
8. ^Sante, Luc (August 19, 2007). Review: On The Road Again. New York Times Book Review.
9. ^Latham, A. (January 28, 1973). 'Visions of Cody'. The New York Times.
10. ^Cowley, Malcolm Cowley & Young, Thomas Daniel (1986). Conversations with Malcolm Cowley. University Press of Mississippi. p. 111.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link)
11. ^Bignell, Paul (July 29, 2007). 'On the Road (uncensored). Discovered: Kerouac 'cuts''. The Independent. London. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007. Retrieved 2007-08-02.
12. ^Anctil, Gabriel (5 September 2007). 'Le Devoir: 50 years of On The Road—Kerouac wanted to write in French'. Le Devoir (in French). Quebec, Canada. Retrieved 2010-12-13.
13. ^'Exhibitions: Kerouac'. bl.uk.
14. ^Sandison, David. Jack Kerouac: An Illustrated Biography. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. 1999
15. ^'Beatdom - Who's Who: A Guide to Kerouac's Characters'. beatdom.com.
16. ^Kerouac, Jack. Visions of Cody. London and New York: Penguin Books Ltd. 1993.
17. ^Ann Charters' introduction to the 1991 edition of On the Road
18. ^David Dempsey (8 September 1957). 'In Pursuit of 'Kicks''. The New York Times.
19. ^ ^abAtlantic Monthly, October 1957.
20. ^ ^ab'Books: The Ganser Syndrome'. Time Magazine. September 16, 1957.
21. ^Thomas Pynchon (13 June 2012). Slow Learner. Penguin Publishing Group. p. 3. ISBN978-1-101-59461-2.
22. ^ ^abcBrooks, David (October 2, 2007). 'Sal Paradise at 50'. The New York Times. Retrieved 16 April 2012.
23. ^'Amazon.com: Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think) - Questions for John Leland'. amazon.com.
24. ^ ^abCarden, Mary Pannicia (2009). Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton (ed.). ''Adventures in Auto-Eroticism': Economies of Traveling Masculinity in On the Road and The First Third'. What's Your Road, Man?. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press: 169–185.
25. ^Tim Hunt (2009). Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton (ed.). 'Typetalking: Voice and Performance in On the Road'. What's Your Road, Man?. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press: 169–185.
26. ^ ^abMatt Theado (2000). Understanding Jack Kerouac. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
27. ^O'Hagan, Sean (August 5, 2007). 'America's first king of the road'. London: The Guardian. Retrieved May 20, 2010.
28. ^Johnston, Allan. 'Consumption, Addiction, Vision, Energy: Political Economies and Utopian Visions in the Writings of the Beat Generation.' College Literature 32.2 (Spring 2005): 103-126. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 95. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 Apr. 2015.
29. ^ ^abScott Martelle (4 June 2005). 'On the road again'. The Age.
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42. ^Holmes, John Clellon (February 1958). 'The Philosophy of the Beat Generation'. Esquire: 35–38.

Jack Kerouac Poems On The Road

Further reading[edit]

• Gifford, Barry & Lee, Lawrence (2005), Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, ISBN1-56025-739-3
• Holladay, Hilary, and Robert Holton, eds. What's Your Road, Man? Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 2009. ISBN978-0809328833
• Leland, John (2007), Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think), New York: Viking Press, ISBN978-0-670-06325-3
• Nicosia, Gerald (1994), Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, Berkeley: University of California Press, ISBN0-520-08569-8
• Theado, Matt (2000), Understanding Jack Kerouac, Columbia SC: University of SC Press, ISBN978-1-57003-846-4
• Hrebeniak, Michael (2006), Action Writing: Jack Kerouac's Wild Form, Carbondale Il: Southern Illinois University Press, ISBN978-0-8093-8789-2

External links[edit]

• The Beat Museum in San Francisco
• On the Road at Open Library
• Interactive Google Maps of the Four Trips in On the Road

Jack Kerouac Poems Online