Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was born as Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts, USA on 12th March 1922. His parents had moved there from Quebec, Canada to find employment. Speaking joual, a Quebec French dialect, at home Kerouac did not start to learn English until he was six. His elder brother Gerard died when Kerouac was only four, from rheumatic fever, and event that profoundly affected him.
In 1939 he moved to New York and attended Horace Mann Prep School before gaining a football scholarship to Columbia University. He broke a leg during his freshman year which brought him into conflict with his coach for keeping him on the bench thereafter. While at the university he wrote several sports articles for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator. His scholarship not panning out prompted Kerouac to drop out of Columbia, though he continued to live in New York for a time with his girlfriend Edie Parker who introduced him to Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs and Neal Cassidy, with whom he would form the group who came to be known as the Beat Generation.
In 1942 he joined the United States Merchant Marines and a year later the United States Navy, though this resulted in an honourable discharge on psychiatric grounds. Then in 1944 he was arrested as an accessory to murder after his close friend, Lucien Carr, had stabbed dead a stalker. Carr and Kerouac disposed of evidence but were persuaded by Burroughs to hand themselves in. His father refused to pay his bail and he persuaded Parker to pay the bail by agreeing to marry her. The marriage only lasted a year and was then annulled. He later wrote about the killing in his novel Vanity of Duluoz.
A year later he married Joan Haverty, though left her after seven months when she announced that she was pregnant, never acknowledging his resulting daughter Jan.
Kerouac did not find it easy to maintain lasting relationships with men or with women, evidenced by his short marriages and his difficulty in acknowledging his bisexuality. He had relationships with men, but never wrote honestly about these despite most of his novels detailing other events in his life. Among his male partners were Allan Ginsberg, William S Burroughs, Allan Ansen and Gore Vidal.
Kerouac's parents moved to the Ozone Park neighbourhood of Queens, New York and he moved in with them for a time. His book, The Town and the City, was published in 1950 and earned respectable reviews, but unfortunately the book didn't sell well. For the following six years he wrote constantly but couldn't find a publisher.
In 1954 he began to immerse himself in Buddhism and then three years later he moved to a small house in Orlando, Florida while he awaited the release of his next book, On the Road. He was proclaimed “the voice of a new generation,” when the reviews came out a dew weeks later. His fame came quickly and was unmanageable for him and he seemed uncomfortable with it, as when he appeared on the Tonight Show with Steve Allen he was sweating and fidgety.
Six months later he moved again, this time to Northport, New York to help care for his ageing mother and in a bid to hide from his newly found celebrity status.
Kerouac later married his third wife, Stella and moved to St Petersburg, Florida with her and his mother. It was here that he died on 21st October 1969 in hospital a day after being rushed in from his home by ambulance, with abdominal pains. His death was attributed to cirrhosis of the liver caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking.
In 2007 he was posthumously honoured with a Doctor of Letters degree from his hometown's University of Massachusetts – Lowell.