Jack Kerouac

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. Jack Kerouac, thought of by many as the father of the beat movement, is considered one of the most influential American writers of the 20th Century. His frenetic fastpaced writing seemed to embody the energy and spirit of the post WW2 youth. Kerouac wrote like a jazz musician plays: fast and free, paying no attention to the rules. His lack of proper punctuation and sentence structure once prompted Truman Capote to say of his work, 'That's not writing, that's typing.' Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on 12 March, 1922. He began working for his father in his printing shop at the age of 10, thus beginning his love of the printed word. He attended both Catholic and public schools, and was a star athlete. He eventually won a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York. While at Columbia, he fell in with a literary crowd, befriending Alan Ginsberg and William Burroughs. After a leg injury ended his shot at football stardom in his sophomore year, Jack dropped out of Columbia and joined the Merchant Marines. He also tried to join the Navy but was discharged shortly afterwards. Kerouac than went back to New York and began writing the somewhat autobiographical tales that would define the Beat Generation. The term 'Beat' was coined by Kerouac during a conversation with Alan Ginsberg. He said their generation was a 'Beat Generation'. But the term 'beat' also fit well in describing that generations musical influence of the day: jazz. Kerouac is best known for his novels, Subterraneans, On the Road, and Dharma Bums. Subterraneans is a short novel that can be both rewarding and somewhat difficult to read at times due the unconventional punctuation. Sentences can run on for pages, interrupted by paragraphs of side thoughts and distractions contained within parenthesis and brackets. On the Road, originally published in 1955, is about a writer named Sal Paradise (actually Kerouac) who meets and becomes obsessed with the character of Dean Moriarity. Sal spends the novel hitchhiking across America, joy riding with Dean to

Mexico, and basically experiencing the freedom of being on the road in post war America. Dharma Bums is one of Kerouac's better novels. It fictionalizes Kerouac's experiences of hanging out in Northern California with Poet Gary Snyder. Called Japhy in the novel, Snyder tutors Kerouac's character in the teachings of Zen Buddhism. Many of these teachings take place on hiking trips to the tops of the Sierra Cascades. Later in the novel, Kerouac's character meditates on these teachings, learning what it's like to commune with nature during a summer-long exercise in isolation when he takes employment as a mountain-top fire lookout in Washington state. While Kerouac is best known as the 'Father of the Beats' he really didn't live the lifestyle of the beats for long. As many of his friends got involved in the radical politics of the '60s, Kerouac began to distance himself from his former colleagues. A political conservative, Jack actual found himself at odds with the hippies by supporting the War in Vietnam. In his later life, Kerouac became an alcoholic recluse, living with his ailing mother in Northport, Long Island. Kerouac died an alcoholic's death in 1969 at the age of 47. While commercially, Kerouac could be considered a prolific writer, much of his writing is unpublished. He began writing journals and diaries at a very young age and continued to do so until his death. He was also a very prolific letter writer. These journals, notebooks, and letters had previously been kept private in the vaults of the Kerouac estate, but they have recently been turned over to historian Douglas Brinkley. Brinkley is currently working on a massive multi-volume edition of this previously unpublished work, and will also pen a biography of Kerouac based on the insights of his journals. Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.