On the Road

Biographie de Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was the descendant of Breton Canadians who married with Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians. He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, where, he wrote, he 'roamed fields and riverbanks by day and night, wrote little novels in my diaries and "newspapers" covering my own-invented horse racing and baseball and football worlds (as recorded in novel Doctor Sax).' Educated by Jesuit brothers in Lowell, 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 become 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 writing 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, most memorably in On the Road, and also in The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums. His other works include Big Sur, Desolation Angels, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Gerard, Tristessa and a book of poetry called Mexico City Blues. His first orthodox published novel was The Town and the City. Kerouac 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.