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Jack Kerouac
(1922-1969)
from: "Fields of Vision” by D.Delaney
Life
Early years Born
in 1922 in Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac
attended school in New York City and then went
to Columbia University for one year. During his year
at college he associated with a group of young men who rejected conventional
moral and social values, and lived in restless pursuit of new sensations. The
group included, among others, the poet Allen Ginsberg. After Kerouac dropped
out of
college, he began a life of restless wandering during which he wrote
constantly. In 1950 his first novel, The
Town and the City, was published to little critical acclaim.
Overnight celebrity
Kerouac’s vagabond trips across America
with his friend Neal Cassidy inspired his second novel, On the Road. The book was written in a three-week, drug-induced,
caffeine-saturated frenzy. Fearing that readers might find the work too unusual
and shocking, the publishers asked Kerouac to revise it. Disappointed and
angry, Kerouac refused to make any changes. He continued roaming across the
country, overindulging in alcohol and writing. Subject to fits of depression
and in serious financial difficulties, he eventually succumbed to his
publishers’ wishes and a substantially edited version of On the Road was finally published in 1957. It was an immediate
success. Kerouac found himself launched into the spotlight as a major American
literary figure, and the spokesman for a generation of young people that he
called the ‘Beat Generation’. The term ‘beat’ was used colloquially to mean ‘tired’
and Kerouac chose it to express the weariness and dissatisfaction young people
felt at the time with the spread of capitalism and puritanical middle-class
values.
Decline in health and early death Kerouac captured the public imagination as a hitchhiking, free-spirited
rebel. In reality he had a fragile, insecure personality and was unable to
handle his newfound celebrity. His dependency on drugs and alcohol worsened.
His attempt to find some peace of mind in Buddhism is chronicled in the novel
The Dharma Burns (1958). In 1961 he tried unsuccessfully to overcome his
addictions and spent time living in an isolated rural location. This experience
is described in his last major novel, Big
Sur (1962).
Tormented and lonely, Kerouac spent his
last years living with his mother and sister. His health continued to decline
and he eventually died in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.
Works
On the Road Kerouac’s autobiographical novel On the Road describes the cross-country wanderings
of Sal Paradise (Kerouac himself) and Dean Moriarty (Kerouac’s friend Neal
Cassidy) in their search for significant experiences. The novel captures the
freedom, promises and possibilities of the vast American continent. It was
written according to Kerouac’s theory of ‘spontaneous prose’. Based on the
principle that ‘something that you feel will find its own form’, Kerouac
recorded events as they happened in fast, flowing prose that mirrored the speed
of the protagonists’ reckless life on the road. Kerouac believed that the
spontaneous prose writer had to be totally focused during the act of writing
and no revision should later change the form that the stream of ideas had
taken. The result is a very distinctive style which is free of literary,
grammatical or syntactical restraints.
Later novels Kerouac’s later novels The Subterraneans (1958) and The Dharma Blues (1958), are written in
the same autobiographical style as On the
Road and continue to mythologise the Beat Generation’s ‘carpe diem’
attitude to life. However, by the time he wrote his final novels, Big Sur (1962) and Desolation Angels (1965), Kerouac had undergone profound changes
which had caused him to lose much of his youthful optimism and ideology. Both
of these works are pained accounts of the author’s decline into depression,
pessimism and substance dependency.
Today Kerouac is still remembered for his first
major success, On the Road. His
masterpiece is still widely read and he, perhaps mistakenly, has entered the
collective imagination as an icon of rebellious youth.
External Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac
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