. There is so much that can be written about him as he lived one of the most fascinating lives (in my opinion), but I will keep it short.
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (known as Jack Kerouac) was born on March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents. He grew up speaking French only despite being American, and didn’t begin learning English until he was six years old, and spoke English with a French accent until his late teen years when he finally was able to lose the accent. His parents were devout Catholics and he always credited his mother with instilling strong faith and Christian values in him from a young age.
Kerouac went to Lowell High School where he was a star athlete in football and wrestling. His skills as a running back in football earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame and Columbia, with him choosing Columbia. He spent a year at Horace Mann School in The Bronx, and after the year he entered Columbia.
He broke his leg while playing football his freshman year and then spent the majority of his sophomore year benched because he did not get along with the Coach and would get into screaming matches with him. He wrote sports articles for the college newspaper during this time and joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. He also studied at The New School in NYC during this time.
When his football career at Columbia ended he decided to drop out of college. He stayed in NYC for a while, living on the Upper West Side with his girlfriend (and future first wife). During this time he met the Beat Generation figures who would shape his legacy and became figures in many of his novels.
Kerouac was a United States Merchant Mariner from July to October 1942 and served on the SS Dorchester before its maiden voyage. While a Merchant Mariner in 1942, Kerouac wrote his first novel, The Sea Is My Brother. The book was published in 2011, 70 years after it was written and over 40 years after Kerouac's death.
In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness in the murder of David Kammerer, who allegedly had been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since he was a teen.
Later, Kerouac lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they had also moved to New York. He wrote his first published novel, The Town and the City, and began On the Road around 1949 when living there.
The Town and the City was published in 1950 under the name "John Kerouac" and got some good reviews but flopped in sales.
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, while living at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty. Kerouac completed the first version of the novel during a three-week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. Kerouac wrote the final draft in 20 days, with Joan, his wife, supplying him with benzedrine, cigarettes, bowls of pea soup, and mugs of coffee to keep him going. After the book was finished being written in 1951, he struggled to find a publisher.
Kerouac had a history of heavy drinking and depression.
In 1957, over six years after it was written, Jack finally found someone who would publish “On The Road”. Viking Press purchased the book but demanded the book be heavily revised before they could publish it. Jack had to remove most of the sexually explicit passages in the book and was forced to use pseudonyms for his characters instead of using the real peoples names to avoid a libel suit. This revision sanitized the book greatly, to Kerouac’s dismay.
The success of the book brought Kerouac fame, but with fame comes both good and bad. Kerouac was jumped and beaten up numerous times by men on the street and his friends were constantly attacked also, as well as robbed. Kerouac became scared to go out in public.
