Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, (1922 - 1969) was an American writer. He was best known for On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Big Sur.
- Jack KerouacOfficial website of Jack Kerouac.
- Jack Kerouac: Poetry FoundationJean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922 to French-Canadian parents in the working-class “Little Canada” neighborhood of Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town some 30 miles northwest of Boston.
- Jack Kerouac: Poets.orgThough best known for his novels, Kerouac is also associated with poetry of the Beat movement, including spoken word.
Research & Reference
- Jack Kerouac: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Jack Kerouac. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
- The Jack Kerouac Archive at UMass LowellThe Kerouac Archive is made up of a number of different individual collections, listed below. At over 100 linear feet, Visions of Kerouac: The John Sampas Collection is one of the most comprehensive Kerouac collections in the world and our largest collection.
- Jack Kerouac Papers: New York Public LibraryThe Jack Kerouac Archive spans the years 1920 to 1977, with the bulk dated 1935 to 1969. The collection chiefly consists of holograph and typescript drafts of Kerouac's novels, stories, poetry, plays and screenplays, journals, diaries, notebooks, autobiographical and spiritual prose, fantasy horseracing, and fantasy baseball game. Other materials include Jack Kerouac's artwork, incoming and outgoing correspondence, photographs, personal and financial papers (including bank statements and canceled checks), publishing contracts, newspaper cuttings, maps, and realia.
Jack Kerouac
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Jack Kerouac, cult writer of the Beat generation, remains an American icon. This documentary focuses on the creative pinnacle of his life—63 days spent as a fire warden on Desolation Peak in Washington State. Examining the time through photos and the commentary of those who knew him, the program illuminates Kerouac’s previous work, while prefiguring his later spiral into alcoholism. This is a moving film essay on the unfulfilled ambitions of one of America’s great avant-garde literary figures. (51 minutes)
Source: Films on Demand
Author's Works & Perspectives
Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960 (LOA #174)
The raucous, exuberant, often wildly funny account of a journey through America and Mexico, Jack Kerouac's On the Road instantly defined a generation on its publication in 1957: it was, in the words of a New York Times reviewer, "the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat.'" Written in the mode of ecstatic improvisation that Allen Ginsberg described as "spontaneous bop prosody," Kerouac's novel remains electrifying in its thirst for experience and its defiant rebuke of American conformity. In his portrayal of the fervent relationship between the writer Sal Paradise and his outrageous, exasperating, and inimitable friend Dean Moriarty, Kerouac created one of the great friendships in American literature; and his rendering of the cities and highways and wildernesses that his characters restlessly explore is a hallucinatory travelogue of a nation he both mourns and celebrates. Now, The Library of America collects On the Road together with four other autobiographical "road books" published during a remarkable four-year period. The Dharma Bums (1958), at once an exploration of Buddhist spirituality and an account of the Bay Area poetry scene, is notable for its thinly veiled portraits of Kerouac's acquaintances, including Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Rexroth. The Subterraneans (1958) recounts a love affair set amid the bars and bohemian haunts of San Francisco. Tristessa (1960) is a melancholy novella describing a relationship with a prostitute in Mexico City. Lonesome Traveler (1960) collects travel essays that evoke journeys in Mexico and Europe, and concludes with an elegiac lament for the lost world of the American hobo. Also included in Road Novels are selections from Kerouac's journal, which provide a fascinating perspective on his early impressions of material eventually incorporated into On the Road. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
The Voice Is All
A groundbreaking portrait of Kerouac as a young artist--from the award-winning author of Minor Characters In The Voice is All, Joyce Johnson, author of her classic memoir, Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac, brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road, followed by Visions of Cody. By illuminating Kerouac's early choice to sacrifice everything to his work, The Voice Is All deals with him on his own terms and puts the tragic contradictions of his nature and his complex relationships into perspective.