JACK KEROUAC

 

LIFE AND MAIN WORKS OF J.KEROUAC


Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell Massachusetts, in 1922,the son of french canadian immigrants. He received a stern catholic upbringing and was educated at local schools and then he went to Columbia University. At the end of the war he started to travel back and forth across the states, and in New York he started lasting friendships with the poet Allen Ginsbergand and the intellectual Neal Cassady. Kerouac was influenced a lot from Cassady: his total lack of inhibitions, his enthusiasms, his love of adventure make Kerouac idolize him. With Cassady, Kerouac began his first hitch- hiking crossing ofAmerica, which inspired his best-known novel:"On the road". After travelling for four months, in October 1947 Kerouac came back to New York and there completed "the town and the city"
This novel was autobiographical.
In the meantime he continued to work on "On the road",narrating all that had happened during his journey with Cassady. When the novel was published in 1957 it had a great success; the book became a best seller and represented the "bible" of beatgeneration. The popularity, frightened the writer who started to lead a solitary and crumbled life because of the abuse of alcohol and drug. After "On the road" followed "The Dharm Bums" and "The Subterraneous" and "Big Sur" which contains an account of the disintegration of all hopes and ""Desolation Angels"". He died in 1969 for the excessive abuse of alcohol and drug, which caused a haemorrhage.

 

KEROUAC AND THE BEAT GENERATION


The expression "Beat Generation" was coined by Kerouac . The word "Beat" had different connotations; it meant "tired", "defeated", and it also suggested the idea of living to the "quick" rhythm of jazz music. The "Beatniks "were a group of people who reacted against the way they saw society developing. They felt controlled, restricted, by the spread of capitalism and puritanical standard middle- class values, which they described as "square ". They acted on first impulse, did whatever they felt like doing, explored nudity, sexuality and pushed their senses to the limits of understanding; when theyreached these limits, they used to take hallucinogenic drugsand alcohol to expand their world and ezplore new landscape.
They created a so-called ""underground culture"", which included jazz, poetry and the oriental philosophy Zen Buddhism. The literary innovation by Beats, can be seen as a reaction to the academic school of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Both Kerouac and Ginsberg, the most important writers of the beat generation, used a so-called ""hip language"", which wasvital, alive, authentic and individual, as opposed to conventional language, which was too dull, conservative, boring, and inadequate to express their new intense experience of reality.


"ON THE ROAD"


"On the road" represents the "sacre text" of the beat generation.
It was a great best seller and it is a diary like account of
Kerouac's wanderings across North America with Neal Cassidy.
The novel lacks a central plot, since its structure is episodic.
However, three structural elements give it cohesion:

 

 
Qualcosa di più su On the road


 

"Le uniche persone per me sono i matti, quelli che non sbadigliano mai e non dicono mai un luogo comune, ma bruciano, bruciano, bruciano come candele romane gialle e favolose, che esplodono come ragni tra le stelle"

J.Kerouac



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