Jack Kerouac
1 book analyzed
Biography
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac (1922-1969) was a French-Canadian American from Lowell, Massachusetts, who attended Columbia University on a football scholarship, dropped out, shipped out with the Merchant Marine, and spent the late 1940s crisscrossing America with Neal Cassady — the real Dean Moriarty. He wrote On the Road in a legendary three-week burst in April 1951, typing on a continuous 120-foot scroll of teletype paper taped together, fueled by coffee and Benzedrine. The scroll manuscript had no paragraph breaks — one continuous stream of language. The novel was rejected by publishers for six years before Viking Press released a heavily edited version in 1957. By then, Kerouac was already disillusioned with the fame it brought. He spent the last decade of his life drinking heavily, living with his mother, and watching the Beat movement he helped create evolve into a counterculture he barely recognized. He died of an abdominal hemorrhage caused by alcoholism at age forty-seven.