Who is Jack Kerouac?
Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. Along with Ernest Hemingway, he is thought to be one of America’s most influential writers. In 1957, he published his most famous book, On the Road. On the Road inspired a generation to take off and travel across America in search of freedom and adventure. At 17, Jack Kerouac won a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York City. A knee injury stopped his chances of becoming a major football star and he began to take a more serious interest in writing. While visiting some familiar haunts, such as Times Square, he became friends with Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso. These writers formed the nucleus of what came to be known as the Beat Generation. They were a group of writers who would push literary boundaries and were open to all new experiences. Neil Cassady was another friend who arrived on the scene and was to have a huge influence on Jack Kerouac. Cassady was a free spirited drifter, a car-thief
Jack Kerouac: (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist, writer, poet, and artist. He is, along with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, amongst the best known of a group of writers and friends who came to be known as the Beat Generation, a term he himself created. Kerouac enjoyed some degree of popular appeal but little critical acclaim during his lifetime. Today, however, he is considered an important and influential author. His spontaneous, confessional prose style has inspired numerous other writers, including Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan and Ken Kesey, as well as authors in the New Journalism school of writing. Kerouac was also an influence on baby boomer musicians, including The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Morrissey and Jim Morrison. Kerouac’s best known works are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur and Visions of Cody. Kerouac divided most of his young adult life between roaming the vast American landscape and life at home with his mother. Faced
Jack Kerouac was a writer with vision; he inhaled his countrymen’s dreams into his soul and exhaled the love of his country in his writing. Brilliant, with a photographic memory, he wrote constantly about real people and real events. He exploded into the nation’s consciousness in 1957 with the publication of On the Road. Like a mirror held up to Eisenhower’s America, the book reflected not Ozzy & Harriet but hobo camps and juke joints across the continent. The novel was a torch ablaze against the dreary Cold War landscape, and the Beat Generation had found its voice.
