Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, where, he said, he
'roamed fields and riverbanks by day and night, wrote little novels
in my room, first novel written at age eleven, also kept extensive
diaries and "newspapers" covering my own-invented horse-racing and
baseball and football worlds' (as recorded in the novel Doctor
Sax). He was educated by Jesuit brothers in Lowell. He said that he
'decided to become a writer at age seventeen under influence of
Sebastian Sampas, local young poet, who later died on Anzio beach
head; read the life of Jack London at eighteen and decided to also
be a lonesome traveler; early literary influences Saroyan and
Hemingway; later Wolfe (after I had broken leg in Freshman football
at Columbia read Tom Wolfe and roamed his New York on
crutches).'
Kerouac wished, however, to develop his own new prose style, which
he called 'spontaneous prose.' He used this technique to record the
life of the American 'traveler' and the experiences of the Beat
generation of the 1950s. This may clearly be seen in his most
famous novel On the Road, and also in The Subterraneans and The
Dharma Bums. His first more orthodox published novel was The Town
and the City. Jack Kerouac, who described himself as a 'strange
solitary crazy Catholic mystic,' was working on his longest novel,
a surrealistic study of the last ten years of his life when he died
in 1969, aged forty-seven.
Other works by Jack Kerouac include Big Sur, Desolation Angels,
Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Gerard, Tristessa, and a book of
poetry called Mexico City Blues. On the Road- The Original Scroll,
the full uncensored transcription of the original manuscript of On
the Road, is published by Penguin Modern Classics.
The most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important
utterance yet made by the
generation Kerouac himself named years ago as "beat"
*The New York Times*
Pop writing at its best. It changed the way I saw the world, making
me yearn for fresh experience
*Independent on Sunday*
On the Road sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso machines,
and also sent countless kids on the road
*William Burroughs*
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