Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
79 Facts About Jack Kerouac
2.
Jack Kerouac's first published book was The Town and the City, and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957.
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Jack Kerouac 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.
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Jack Kerouac has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jerry Garcia and the Doors.
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In 1969, at the age of 47, Jack Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking.
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Jack Kerouac was born on March 12,1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French Canadian parents, Leo-Alcide Keroack and Gabrielle-Ange Levesque.
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Research has shown that Jack Kerouac's roots were indeed in Brittany, and he was descended from a middle-class merchant colonist, Urbain-Francois Le Bihan, Sieur de Kervoac, whose sons married French Canadians.
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Jack Kerouac's father Leo had been born into a family of potato farmers in the village of Saint-Hubert-de-Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec.
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Jack Kerouac had various stories on the etymology of his surname, usually tracing it to Irish, Breton, Cornish, or other Celtic roots.
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Jack Kerouac, derived from Kervoach, is the name of a town in Brittany in Lanmeur, near Morlaix.
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Jack Kerouac later referred to 34 Beaulieu Street as "sad Beaulieu".
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The Kerouac family was living there in 1926 when Jack's older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever, aged nine.
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Jack Kerouac had one other sibling, an older sister named Caroline.
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Jack Kerouac was referred to as Ti Jean or little John around the house during his childhood.
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Jack Kerouac spoke French with his family and began learning English at school, around age six; he began speaking it confidently in his late teens.
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Jack Kerouac was a serious child who was devoted to his mother, who played an important role in his life.
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Jack Kerouac was a devout Catholic, who instilled this deep faith into both her sons.
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Jack Kerouac later said she was the only woman he ever loved.
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Some of Jack 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.
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In 2016, a whole volume of previously unpublished works originally written in French by Jack Kerouac was published as La vie est d'hommage.
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On May 17,1928, while six years old, Jack Kerouac made his first Confession.
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Jack 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.
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Jack Kerouac cites Wyse as the person who introduced him to the new styles of jazz, including Bop.
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Jack 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.
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Jack Kerouac was a resident of Livingston Hall and Hartley Hall, where other Beat Generation figures lived.
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When his football career at Columbia ended, Jack Kerouac dropped out of the university.
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Jack Kerouac continued to live for a time in New York's Upper West Side with his girlfriend and future first wife, Edie Parker.
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Jack Kerouac was a United States Merchant Mariner from July to October 1942 and served on the SS Dorchester before her maiden voyage.
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Jack Kerouac served eight days of active duty with the Navy before arriving on the sick list.
30.
In 1944, Jack Kerouac was arrested as a material witness in the murder of David Kammerer, who had been stalking Jack Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St Louis.
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William Burroughs was a native of St Louis, and it was through Carr that Jack Kerouac came to know both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.
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Jack Kerouac disposed of the murder weapon and buried Kammerer's eyeglasses.
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Jack Kerouac then agreed to marry Edie Parker if her parents would pay the bail.
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Jack Kerouac later wrote about the killing in his novel Vanity of Duluoz.
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Later, Jack Kerouac lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they had moved to New York.
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Jack Kerouac wrote his first published novel, The Town and the City, and began On the Road around 1949 when living there.
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Heavily influenced by Jack 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.
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Jack Kerouac learned to drive aged 34, but never had a formal license.
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Jack Kerouac completed the first version of the novel during a three-week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose.
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Jack 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.
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Jack Kerouac often experienced episodes of heavy drinking and depression.
42.
At the request of his editors, Jack Kerouac changed the setting of the novel from New York to San Francisco.
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In 1954, Jack Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of his study of Buddhism.
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Jack Kerouac wrote Some of the Dharma, an imaginative treatise on Buddhism, while living there.
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However, Jack Kerouac had earlier taken an interest in Eastern thought.
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Jack Kerouac's fame came as an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing.
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Jack Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the post-World War II Beat Generation and Jack Kerouac came to be called "the king of the beat generation," a term with which he never felt comfortable.
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Jack Kerouac was badly beaten by three men outside the San Remo Cafe at 189 Bleecker Street in New York City one night.
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Jack 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.
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Jack Kerouac wrote and narrated a beat movie titled Pull My Daisy, directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie.
51.
Jack 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.
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Jack Kerouac moved in with his mother in Hyannis, Massachusetts for almost a year in 1966.
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Arguments over the movement, which Jack Kerouac believed was only an excuse to be "spiteful," resulted in him splitting with Ginsberg by 1968.
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Also in 1968, Kerouac last appeared on television, for Firing Line, produced and hosted by William F Buckley Jr.
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Jack Kerouac suddenly felt nauseated and went to the bathroom, where he began to vomit blood.
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Jack Kerouac was taken to St Anthony's Hospital, suffering from an esophageal hemorrhage.
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Jack Kerouac 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.
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Jack Kerouac never regained consciousness after the operation, and died at the hospital at 5:15 the following morning, at the age of 47.
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Jack Kerouac is buried at Edson Cemetery in Lowell, Massachusetts.
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Jack Kerouac is generally considered to be the father of the Beat movement, although he actively disliked such labels.
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Jack Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others.
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Later, Jack Kerouac included ideas he developed from his Buddhist studies that began with Gary Snyder.
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The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain climbing trip Jack Kerouac took with Snyder, and includes excerpts of letters from Snyder.
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Jack Kerouac described the experience in Desolation Angels and later in The Dharma Bums.
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Jack Kerouac would go on for hours, often drunk, to friends and strangers about his method.
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Some believed that at times Jack Kerouac's writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose.
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Jack Kerouac refers to this short novel in a letter addressed to Neal Cassady dated January 10,1953.
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The Unknown Jack 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.
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Jack Kerouac's early writing, particularly his first novel The Town and the City, was more conventional, and bore the strong influence of Thomas Wolfe.
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The technique Jack Kerouac developed that later gained him notoriety was heavily influenced by jazz, especially Bebop, and later, Buddhism, as well as the Joan Anderson letter written by Neal Cassady.
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An often overlooked literary influence on Jack Kerouac was James Joyce, whose work he alludes to more than any other author.
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Jack Kerouac had high esteem for Joyce and he often used Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique.
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An annual Jack Kerouac festival was established in Lanmeur in 2010.
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In 2007, Jack Kerouac was posthumously awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
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The movie describes the people and places on which Jack Kerouac based his characters and settings, including the cabin in Bixby Canyon.
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In 2010, during the first weekend of October, the 25th anniversary of the literary festival "Lowell Celebrates Jack Kerouac" was held in Jack Kerouac's birthplace of Lowell, Massachusetts.
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Jack Kerouac has been depicted in the films Howl and Kill Your Darlings.
78.
Many of Jack Kerouac's poems follow the style of his free-flowing, uninhibited prose, incorporating elements of jazz and Buddhism.
79.
In much of his poetry, to achieve a jazz-like rhythm, Jack Kerouac made use of the long dash in place of a period.