Jack Kerouac



Essential biography
On the road
The beat generation

Essential biography

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachussets, in 1922, son of French-Candian immigrants.
He went to the local schools and studied at the Columbia University. At the end of the war he began travelling across the United States, meeting many people  and many intelectuals like Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Neal Cassidy.
The influence of Cassidy was enormous in Kerouac: he considered the man like a new hero for his lack of inhibitions, his personalty full of enthusiasm.
Kerouac and Cassidy started a travel together across the America and, after 4 months of travel, Kerouac began writing his experiences in a book.
Kerouac came back in New York in October 1947 where he wrote The town and the city, but he was still working for On the road. He ended it in 1957 and marked the beginnign of Kerouac's success.His style was completely new: like most other novels, On the road was autobiographical, full of details of daily life and enthusiasm for the most common objects or events.
The book soon became the Bible of the beat generation. The popularity frightened the writer who decided to begin a solitary life and began using drugs and alcohol.
Kerouac died in 1969, 47 years old, of an haemorrhage caused by drinking alcohol and drug abuse.





On the road

The novel lacks of a real plot since the story is told by an episodic style but you can ever find three elements: the theme of the journey as the escape from the city and from the scoiety; the protagonist Sal Pardise who is Kerouac himself; the same group of friends who always are travelling across the huge lands of America. They don't find anything at the end of their journey but they, however, keep on travelling. The main character is Dean Moriarty, who actally is Neil Cassidy. Dean symbolises the hope of the new post-war generations of living every moment with every intesity. This was a very important feeling because Kerouac tried to explain the fear that a war takes: after a war everyone begins to love his life, as Dean Morarty does.
On the road, Dean and Sal live free and wild and can do whatever they want, listen whatevere they like. The music is very important: Kerouac describes the new music-styles coming out in that period, like jazz, blues and rock and roll.
Kerouac, as Ginsberg and the other beat-writers, used a new style and an innovative language. He wrote about his feelings and his thoughts watching an object or living a partuclar event. The beat-writers called this "hip-language", which was more suitable to their intentions. The old language, they said, was too inadeqaute for describing this kind of feelings, too conservative and boring while the new language was more authentic and individual.
Kerouac uses a spontaneous prose, using the words that came in his mind while he was writing and giving a new example of improvisation. The unsophisticated language that results from thi method was definded "hip language".




The beat generation

Jack Kerouac was the first who cined the expression "Beat generation2. we told that beat means tired, defeated.
The Beatniks were a grouop of writers that reacted against the post.war American society that was creating: they weren't agree with the capitalistic system, they felt controlled, defeated by the standardization.
They acted on first impulse, doing whaetever they liked to do, using alohol, hallucinogenic drugs to explore new edges of knowledge. They knew the sexuality, the nudism; they rebelled against the conventional physical appearance, using large T-shirts, long hair, wounded jeans.
They had their reference place in the City Light Bookstore in San Francisco founded by Laurence Ferlinghetti in 1953, where they could read their works in public.




The Route 66

Route 66 is an old American road that links hicago to Los Angeles, cutting all the United States. The road is a symbol of freedom, of hope, of rebellion. For the novelist John steinback is "The Mther road", for Jim Morrison is "The Highway of the king"; there are many songs about Route 66 and both Bing Crosby and The Rolling Stones sang about it.
Route 66 was opened in 1926 and that was the date of birth of many her passengers too.the road has seen the America changing drammatically; during the Great Depression it was the road of hope used by the the unemplyed agricoltural who wanted to reach Los Angeles and find some job.
In the post-war, the route 66 was the symbol of the rebellion, of the travel, of the freedom and that is the the road that Kerouac has described us: the long, huge road that takes to everything or takes to nothing, but however that road is the land where many generations have grown up and where they had the most important experiences of their lifes.