Kerouac :: essays research papers

innate(p) on March 12, 1922, the youngest of three children in a French-Canadian family that had established itself in Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac was by the age of ten already aiming to become a writer. His father ran a print shop and published a local anaesthetic newsletter called the Spotlight. Before long he began writing and producing his own romp sheet, which he sold to friends and acquaintances in Lowell. He attended both Catholic and public schools, and won athletic scholarships to the Horace Mann prep school (in New York) and wherefore to Columbia University. In New York he fell in with sonny boy literary-icons-to-be Allen Ginsberg, the poet, and William S. Burroughs, the novelist. A broken leg hobbled his college football c atomic number 18er, and Kerouac quit Columbia in his sopho more(prenominal) year, eventually joining the merchant marine and then naval forces (from which he was discharged). Thus began the restless wandering that would characterize both hi s legacy and his life.To Kerouac, Beat a shorthand term for beatitude and the idea that the downtrodden are saintly was not to the highest degree politics but about spirituality and art. The thirty published and unpublished books he wrote from 1941 to 1969 include Kerouacs thirteen-volume, more or less autobiographical Legend of Duluoz a study of a particular lifetime, his own, in the manner of Honore de Balzacs Human Comedy or Marcel Pousts Remembrance of Things Past.Kerouac set out to become the quintessential literary mythmaker of postwar America, creating his Legend of Duluoz by spinning poetic tales about his adventures. I promise I shall never give up, and that Ill discover yelling and laughing, Kerouac wrote in his diary in 1949. And that until then Ill wad around this world I insist in holy and roll at everyones lapel and make them confess to me and to all. At the time when Norman Mailer was playing sociologist by studying whit Negro hipsters, Kerouac sought to key his fascinatingly inchoate friend Neal Cassady as the modern-day equivalent of the furious West legends Jim Bridger, Pecos Bill, and Jesse James. Like the Lowell boy he never quite ceased to be, Kerouac aphorism football players and range-worn cowboys as the paragons of true America his diaries teem with references to folk heroes and valuate for Zane Greys honest drifters, Herman Melvilles confidence men, and Babe condolences feats on the diamond and in the barroom. Kerouac brought Cassady into the American mythical pantheon as the mad Ahab at the wheel, compelling others to join his roaring drive crossways Walt Whitmans patchwork Promise Land.