Jack Kerouac

Born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French-Canadian parents, Jack Kerouac did not learn English until the age of six and spoke with a marked accent well into his teens. His older brother Gerard, whom he idolized, died of rheumatic fever at age nine, when Jack was only four, a loss that haunted him for the rest of his life and inspired the novel Visions of Gerard (1963). He won a football scholarship to Columbia University but broke his leg in his freshman year and dropped out, beginning the restless, cross-country wandering that would define both his life and his art. He served briefly as a merchant mariner during World War II. In April 1951, fueled by Benzedrine and coffee, he fed a continuous scroll of teletype paper into his typewriter and wrote the 175,000-word first draft of On the Road in three weeks. The novel was not published until 1957, when it made him an instant celebrity and the reluctant king of the Beat Generation, alongside his friends Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958), and Big Sur (1962) continued his experiments in "spontaneous prose", a method he compared to jazz improvisation. Fame proved ruinous. He drank with increasing desperation, alienated old friends, and retreated to live with his mother. He died on October 21, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida, of an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis. He was forty-seven.