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Jack Kerouac biography

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Quick Facts

  • PLACE OF BIRTH: Lowell, Massachusetts
  • PLACE OF DEATH: St. Petersburg, Louisiana
  • Originally: Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac
more about Jack

Best Known For

Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road, one of the most enduring American novels of all time. He was a pioneer of the Beat Generation in the 1950s.

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  • Jack Kerouac - Mini Bio (3:43)

    • Jack Kerouac - Mini Bio

    As a writer and pioneer of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac epitomized the era of sex, drugs, and jazz. His novel "On the Road," which he wrote in a three-week bender of writing frenzy, became the bible of the countercultural generation.

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Synopsis

Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road, one of the most enduring American novels of all time, in one 3-week bender of writing frenzy, on a single roll of paper. Along with friend Allen Ginsberg, Kurouac was pioneer of the Beat Generation. He wrote in a spontaneous fashion about Buddhism, Catholic spirituality, jazz, drugs,

Contents

Quotes

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.
– Jack Kerouac

sexuality and travel. Some of his other novels include The Dharma Bums and Big Sur.

Profile

Writer. Born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts. A thriving mill town in the mid-19th century, Lowell had become, by the time of Jack Kerouac's birth, a down-and-out burg where unemployment and heavy drinking prevailed. Kerouac's parents, Leo and Gabrielle, were immigrants from Quebec, Canada; Kerouac learned to speak French at home before he learned English at school. Leo Kerouac owned his own print shop, Spotlight Print, in downtown Lowell, and Gabrielle Kerouac, known to her children as Memere, was a homemaker. Kerouac later described the family's home life: "My father comes home from his printing shop and undoes his tie and removes [his] 1920's vest and sits himself down at hamburger and boiled potatoes and bread and butter & with the kiddies and the good wife."

Jack Kerouac endured a childhood tragedy in the summer of 1926, when his beloved older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of 9. Drowning in grief, the Kerouac family embraced their Catholic faith more deeply. Kerouac's writing is full of vivid memories of attending church as a child: "From the open door of the church warm and golden light swarmed out on the snow. The sound of the organ and singing could be heard."

Kerouac's two favorite childhood pastimes were reading and sports. He devoured all the 10-cent fiction magazines available at the local stores, and he also excelled at football, basketball and track. Although Kerouac dreamed of becoming a novelist and writing the "great American novel," it was sports, not writing, that Kerouac viewed as his ticket to a secure future. With the onset of the Great Depression, the Kerouac family suffered from financial difficulties, and Kerouac's father turned to alcohol and gambling to cope. His mother took a job at a local shoe factory to boost the family income, but in 1936 the Merrimack River flooded its banks and destroyed Leo Kerouac's print shop, sending him into a spiral of worsening alcoholism and condemning the family to poverty. Kerouac, who was by that time a star running back on the Lowell High School football team, saw football as his ticket to a college scholarship, which in turn might allow him to secure a good job and save his family's finances.

Upon graduating from high school in 1939, Kerouac received a football scholarship to Columbia University, but first he had to attend a year of preparatory school at the Horace

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