Jack Kerouac gained fame as the author of On the Road, the novel that
best reflects the values and attitudes of a literary movement known as the
Beat Movement, or Beat Generation.
Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, into a working-class
French-Canadian family on March 12, 1922. He spoke only French
until he was seven years old. Kerouac was an imaginative boy, who wrote
his own newspapers, radio plays, and novels. He excelled in his school
studies and developed into a gifted athlete. A football scholarship took
him to Columbia University in New York City. Things did not work out
there as well as he had hoped. He broke his leg the first season, and in
1941 he spent much of the season arguing with his coach.
By that time, World War II (1939–45) was in full swing, and
Kerouac struggled with what he considered a national shift in morals
brought about by the war. He left college to join the U.S. Merchant
Marine. He returned to New York in 1942 but soon left again to join the
U.S. Navy. He had difficulty with the military’s discipline, and also
spent time in the psychiatric ward of Bethesda Naval Hospital in
Maryland. He left the Navy with an honorable discharge for “indifferent character” and returned to New York City.
Dawn of the Beats
In 1943, Kerouac met and befriended William
Burroughs (1914–1997) and Allen Ginsberg
(1926–1997), two published writers who, along
with Kerouac, would form the core of the Beat
Generation. Ginsberg was just seventeen when
he met Kerouac; Burroughs was several years
older than both men. He would become their
mentor and would have great influence over
Kerouac. It was Burroughs who introduced him
to morphine and the underground drug scene of
New York’s Times Square.
In 1950, Kerouac published an autobiography called The Town and the City. While working on the book, he would take breaks and visit
friends. He met Neal Cassady (1926–1968), a
young criminal with a serious drug and alcohol
addiction. For Kerouac, Cassady was the epitome of the American Dream: someone who did
not have to work, who lived by his own rules,
and did whatever he pleased. The two became
fast friends.
Without consciously realizing it, Kerouac
and his friends established a new artistic protest movement that would
span roughly throughout the 1950s. Self-declared nonconformists, these
men were so influential to their culture that they immediately became
the antiheroes of the day. The media dubbed them beatniks.
The term beat has never been clearly defined. Kerouac is said to have
coined the term Beat Generation when he suggested he and his friends
were beaten down in frustration at the difficulty of individual expression
at a time when artists were intent on conforming. On another occasion,
Kerouac said beat was derived from the word beatific, suggesting the
Beats had earned intellectual grace through the purity of their lives.
Whatever the origin, the Beat Generation and all it stood for was reflected in Kerouac’s next novel, On the Road. The book’s subject was a
fictionalized Neal Cassady and the friendship they shared. It took just
twenty days for Kerouac to type a 175,000-word manuscript that was
stylized to imply the same kind of energy as the story itself. The author called it “spontaneous prose,” and the raw energy it put forth was too
new and experimental; no publishing house would touch it. For six
years, On the Road sat. Those years turned out to be Kerouac’s most productive, as he attacked each new novel with the same passion and energy
as he had his unpublished manuscript.
Finally, in 1957, Viking Press published On the Road, but only after
Kerouac agreed to extensive cuts and revisions. By that time, the Beat
Generation was a literary force, and the time was right for an experimental novel. Most critics considered the book a disaster and nothing more
than an immoral act of rebellion, one that glorified drug use, sex, and
cheap thrills. It has since been chosen by Time magazine as one of the
hundred best English-language novels published between 1923 and
2005. The original manuscript, which is actually a 120-foot-long (37-
meter) roll of paper fed through Kerouac’s typewriter, was sold for $2.4
million in 2001.
Post–On the Road
Although Ginsberg and Burroughs were writers whose work embodied
the Beats, it was Kerouac who was hailed as the father of the movement.
It was a label he resented, and one he felt inclined to live up to. These
years of fame intensified Kerouac’s alcoholism, and he aged quickly. He
continued to write, but his work was considered too quirky to publish.
He had visions of publishing separate but interconnected novels, but
things did not work out that way. In two years’ time, he published six
novels while at the same time appearing on television shows, writing
magazine articles, and recording spoken-word albums. Kerouac became
burnt out and unstable.
By 1961, Kerouac had further deteriorated and his work was not
taken seriously. He drank himself into a constant stupor, and his unraveling life was the subject of his last major novel, Big Sur. Kerouac went
home to live with his mother, where he would stay until his death.
Although always drunk, he continued to write and publish, though the
quality of his writing suffered severely.
As the 1960s progressed and the beat movement gave way to the
hippie movement, Kerouac found pleasure in publicly standing against
whatever it was the hippies were promoting. His politics were conservative, and he supported the Vietnam War (1954–75). Some believe this
stance was nothing more than the writer’s bitterness at having been left behind or falling out of the spotlight. Whatever the reason, Kerouac
spent his last years living with his third wife and mother. Kerouac died
at home in Lowell, Massachusetts, of liver disease brought on by alcoholism. He was forty-seven years old.
Kerouac’s wife had his papers sealed, and it was not until her death
in 1990 that they were made available for publication. In addition to volumes of poetry, some of Kerouac’s correspondence was published. These
letters were written to Ginsberg, Cassady, book editors, and Kerouac’s
first wife. The letters are valuable because they shed light on the background of the writing of On the Road. The book was rereleased in 2007,
its fiftieth anniversary. By 2001, the novel had 3.5 million copies in the
United States alone. It continues to sell at a rate of 110,000 to 130,000 copies every year, according to the New York Times.