Kerouac Jack

American writer and poet, the author of 21 books including "The Town and the City," 1950, "The Subterraneans," 1958 and "Big Sur." He is perhaps best known for "The Dharma Bums," 1958 and "On The Road," 1957, the classic novels that established him as a hero who epitomized the style of living and writing associated with the "Beat Movement," and serving as the Bible for Beatniks. Jack Kerouac was the third of four children born to Gabrielle and Leo Kerouac, French-Canadian immigrants who moved to New England. With English as his second language, he grew up in Lowell, acutely suffering the loss at age nine of his younger brother, four-year-old Gerard. After graduating Lowell High School in 1939, he moved to New York City, where he attended Horace Mann Preparatory School and two years later, began a brief stint at Columbia University on a football scholarship. By 1942 he was sailing to Greenland as a merchant marine and one year later, enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he was soon discharged on psychiatric grounds. He then sailed to Liverpool as a merchant seaman. When he returned to New York City in 1944, he met Lucien Carr, who introduced him to Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. He was abruptly jailed as an accessory and material witness in the David Kammerer murder case when Kammerer was killed by Carr. Kerouac made a clean getaway from the case with a hasty marriage to Edie Parker so that her family would pay his bail. In 1945 Kerouac began work on the account of his Lowell boyhood with "The Town and The City" when he met the charismatic and bisexual Neal Cassady, a Denver reform school graduate and car thief who eventually became Kerouacs lover and buddy. After his marriage to Parker was annulled that same year, he collaborated with William S. Burroughs on an unpublished novel, "And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks," an account of the events surrounding the Kammerer murder. Spending the next three years traveling the country with Cassady, during which time he coined the term "Beat Generation," the pair arrived in New York in 1949 where "The Town and The City" was published the following year. After jaunts with Cassady to Denver and Mexico, he made a second marriage to Joan Haverty in New York in the latter half of 1950. During a three week binge of creativity in the following April and May, he wrote "On The Road" on a single ream of paper. After separating from Haverty, he discovered the compositional method of "sketching" and "spontaneous prose," and rewrote "On The Road" as an experimental work. Following Neal Cassadys marriage to Caroline, Kerouac moved into the attic of their San Francisco home, where they made up a ménage a trois. He was hospitalized in 1951 with thrombophlebitis as a result of heavy Benzedrine use. Between 1952 and 1956, Kerouac roamed the US and Mexico taking odd jobs to support himself while studying Buddhism, writing and notably, attending the first public reading of "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco, 13 October 1955. By 1957, after traveling throughout Europe and North Africa, he was living in Greenwich Village with Joyce Glassman. After moving to Orlando, Florida that same year with his mother, he wrote "The Dharma Bums" and a year later, bought a house in Northport, NY. While living in Northport, he wrote a column for "Escapade" and narrated the film "Pull My Daisy," which was based on his play "The Beat Generation." While living in Big Sur, California in 1960, Read less