The electric traveler

Kerouac: He spent his life 'On the Road'

March 12, 1998
Web posted at: 3:51 p.m. EST (2051 GMT)

(CNN) -- If Jack Kerouac were alive today, he would have gotten to see his talent realized. One of the unintentional founding fathers of the Beat Generation, Kerouac was a citizen of the world but seemed to wander aimlessly in the later years of his life.

The electric traveler was born today in 1922 as Jean-Louis in Lowell, Massachusetts. In his youth his French-Canadian parents found their standard of living declining along with the town's textile industry. When he secured a football scholarship to Columbia they moved with their son to New York.

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"It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey. I could see that it was all going to be one big saga of mist. 'Whoopee!' yelled Dean. 'Here we go!' And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that. We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function at the time, move ."
-- From "On The Road"

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He never really adjusted to university life. He dropped out and joined up with the Merchant Marine. In New York he met an assortment of characters who would later form the Beat Generation, which included Columbia students Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, and the fringe-dancing William S. Burroughs. Another friend was Neal Cassady, a free-wheeling street cowboy who had a bug to travel and infected Kerouac with his desire to hit the road.

MESSAGE BOARD

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and others. You've heard the names, maybe you've read the stories. But what did those stories and poems mean to you?

SELECTED WORKS

On the Road Maggie Cassidy Lonesome Traveler Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three The Dharma Bums

Despite the perception that this group of writers was a bunch of loose cannons sitting around in cafes spouting beautiful nonsense, they were highly connected in the literary world. Ginsberg got Kerouac's first novel "The Town and The City" published as he did with some of Burrough's books. The Beat Generation had a respected underground following in New York and California.

Kerouac would not land on the literary map until he penned "On the Road", a rambling cross-country road tale inspired by his travels with Cassady.

Success, however, would be Kerouac's downfall. It tarnished his view of the world as he tried to live up to the fiery, imaginative things that he wrote about. Critics were slow to accept him. They deemed Beat writing a fad and looked for Kerouac's work to fade. Deeply distressed, the sensitive writer began drinking and frequently went on binges.

Kerouac wrote several vivid works but nothing ever topped "On The Road." He turned more and more to the bottle and sought the comfort of living with his mother. He died in 1969 at age 47 in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Excerpt of a New York Times review; Sept. 8, 1957 By David Dempsey

"Thirty years ago it was fashionable for the young and weary - creatures of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald - simply to be "lost." Today, one depression and two wars later, in order to remain uncommitted one must at least flirt with depravity. "On the Road" belongs to the new Bohemianism in American fiction in which an experimental style is combined with eccentric characters and a morally neutral point of view. It is not so much a novel as a long affectionate lark inspired by the so-called "beat" generation, and an example of the degree to which some of the most original work being done in this country has come to depend upon the bizarre and the offbeat for its creative stimulus. Jack Kerouac has written an enormously readable and entertaining book but one reads it in the same mood that he might visit a sideshow -- the freaks are fascinating although they are hardly part of our lives."

Related stories:

• CNN Travel - Destination: Monterey, California
• Happy Birthday to Jack Kerouac - March 12, 1997
• 'Prophet of 1960s' Allen Ginsberg dead at 70 - April 5, 1997

Related sites:

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• Jack Kerouac on writing
• The Kerouac Quarterly
• Official Jack Kerouac Foundation
• DHARMA beat, a Jack Kerouac newszine

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.

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