KEROUAC, JACK

born March 12, 1922, Lowell, Mass., U.S. died Oct. 21, 1969, St. Petersburg, Fla. original name Jean-Louis Kerouac U.S. poet and novelist, leader and spokesman of the Beat movement. Kerouac gave the Beat movement its name and celebrated its code of poverty and freedom in a series of novels of which the first and best known is On the Road (1957). Of French-Canadian descent, Kerouac learned English as a second language as a schoolboy. Discharged from the Navy during World War II as a schizoid personality, he served as a merchant seaman. Thereafter he roamed the United States and Mexico, working at a variety of jobs that included railroad man and forest ranger, before he published his first novel, The Town and the City (1950). Dissatisfied with fictional conventions, however, Kerouac developed a new, spontaneous, nonstop, unedited method of writing that shocked more polished writers. On the Road, written in three weeks, was the first product of the new style. A formless book, it deals with a number of frenetic trips back and forth across the country by a number of penniless young people who are in love with life, beauty, jazz, sex, drugs, speed, and mysticism but have absolute contempt for alarm clocks, timetables, road maps, mortgages, pensions, and all traditional American rewards for industry. The book drew the attention of the public to a widespread subterranean culture of poets, folksingers, hipsters, mystics, and eccentrics, including the writers Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, all important contributors to the Beat movement. All of Kerouac's works, including The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958), Doctor Sax (1959), Lonesome Traveler (1960), and Desolation Angels (1965), are autobiographical, and most of them feature other prominent Beat writers as characters. The posthumously published Visions of Cody (1972) was originally a part of On the Road. Additional reading Biographies include Ann Charters, Kerouac (1973, reissued 1994); Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe (1983, reissued 1994); Tom Clark, Jack Kerouac (1984, reissued 1995); and Warren French, Jack Kerouac (1986). Critical analyses are found in Tim Hunt, Kerouac's Crooked Road (1981, reissued 1996); and Regina Weinreich, The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac (1987, reprinted 1995).