Kerouac :: essays research papers

Born on March 12, 1922, the youngest of three children in a French-Canadian family that had established itself in Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac was by the age of ten already aiming to become a writer. His father ran a print shop and create a local newsletter called the Spotlight. Before long he began penning and producing his own sport sheet, which he sold to friends and acquaintances in Lowell. He go to both Catholic and public instructs, and won athletic scholarships to the Horace Mann prep school (in New York) and thence to Columbia University. In New York he go away in with fellow literary-icons-to-be Allen Ginsberg, the poet, and William S. Burroughs, the novelist. A broken leg hobbled his college football career, and Kerouac throw in the towel Columbia in his sophomore year, eventually joining the merchant devil dog and then Navy (from which he was discharged). Thus began the restless wandering that would characterise both his legacy and his life.To Kerouac, Beat a shorthand term for beatitude and the idea that the downtrodden are saintly was not ab bulge out politics and about spirituality and art. The thirty published and unpublished books he wrote from 1941 to 1969 include Kerouacs thirteen-volume, more or less autobiographical Legend of Duluoz a study of a particular lifetime, his own, in the manner of Honore de Balzacs humane Comedy or Marcel Pousts Remembrance of Things Past.Kerouac set out to become the quintessential literary mythmaker of postwar America, creating his Legend of Duluoz by go around poetic tales about his adventures. I promise I shall neer hurl up, and that Ill die yelling and laughing, Kerouac wrote in his diary in 1949. And that until then Ill rush around this world I insist in holy and pull at everyones lapel and make them confess to me and to all. At the time when Norman Mailer was playing sociologist by studying whit blackness hipsters, Kerouac sought to depict his fascinatingly inchoate friend Neal Cas sady as the modern equivalent of the Wild West legends Jim Bridger, Pecos Bill, and Jesse James. Like the Lowell boy he never quite ceased to be, Kerouac saw football players and range-worn cowboys as the paragons of true America his diaries burgeon forth with references to folk heroes and praise for Zane Greys honest drifters, Herman Melvilles confidence men, and Babe Ruths feats on the diamond and in the barroom. Kerouac brought Cassady into the American mythical pantheon as the mad Ahab at the wheel, compelling others to join his prosperous drive across Walt Whitmans patchwork Promise Land.