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Jack Kerouac although he preferred being called Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac was born on the 12th March 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts and died on the 21 October 1969. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. His books cover topics like Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. In 1969, at age 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal haemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. In his high school life, he was good at football as a running back. earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and Columbia University. Kerouac joined the United States Merchant Marine in 1942 and in 1943 joined the United States Navy but served only eight days of active duty before arriving on the sick list. According to his medical report, Kerouac said he 'asked for an aspirin for his headaches and they diagnosed me dementia praecox and sent me here. He was diagnosis of 'schizoid personality'.
While serving in the United States Merchant Marine, Kerouac wrote his first novel The Sea Is My Brother. Although written in 1942, the book was not published until 2011,
In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness in the murder of David Kammerer, who had been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. William Burroughs was also a native of St. Louis, and it was through Carr that Kerouac came to know both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.
He wrote his first published novel, The Town and the City, and began the famous On the Road around 1949 when living there. His friends jokingly called him 'The Wizard of Ozone Park', alluding to Thomas Edison's nickname, 'the Wizard of Menlo Park', and to the film The Wizard of Oz. For the next six years, Kerouac continued to write regularly. Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled 'The Beat Generation' and 'Gone on the Road,' Kerouac completed what is now known as On the Road in April 1951. In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of his study of Buddhism. However, Kerouac had earlier taken an interest in Eastern thought. In 1946 he read Heinrich Zimmer's Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. In 1955, Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, titled Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, which was unpublished during his lifetime, but eventually serialized in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993–95. It was published by Viking in September 2008.
Kerouac is generally considered to be the father of the Beat movement, although he actively disliked such labels. Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, Kerouac included ideas he developed from his Buddhist studies that began with Gary Snyder. He often referred to his style as 'spontaneous prose.' Although Kerouac's prose was spontaneous and purportedly without edits, he primarily wrote autobiographical novels based upon actual events from his life and the people with whom he interacted.
Many of his books exemplified this spontaneous approach, including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterranean. The central features of this writing method were the ideas of breath (borrowed from jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and limited revision. Connected with this idea of breath was the elimination of the period, substituting instead a long connecting dash. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words take on a certain musical rhythm and tempo.
Therefore Jack Kerouac was a literary iconoclast alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. He was born on 12th March 1922 and died on the 21st October 1969 at the age of 47. This was because of drugs. He wrote at least 8 books. And one of his quotes was I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
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