Jack kerouac a biography of albert

This concise biography draws on both new and established research on Kerouac to lay out the facts and distinguish the man from the myth. A Timeline of Events will help readers understand the important occurrences in Kerouac's life, his travels, his writings, involvement in the Beat movement, and the larger context of literary and political events of his time.

He devoured all the cent fiction magazines available at the local stores, and he also excelled at football, basketball and track. Although Kerouac dreamed of becoming a novelist and writing the "great American novel," it was sports, not writing, that Kerouac viewed as his ticket to a secure future. With the onset of the Great Depression, the Kerouac family suffered from financial difficulties, and Kerouac's father turned to alcohol and gambling to cope.

His mother took a job at a local shoe factory to boost the family income, but, inthe Merrimack River flooded its banks and destroyed Leo's print shop, sending him into a spiral of worsening alcoholism and condemning the family to poverty. Kerouac, who by that time, was a star running back on the Lowell High School football team, saw football as his ticket to a college scholarship, which, in turn, might allow him to secure a good job and save his family's finances.

Literary Beginnings Upon graduating from high school inKerouac received a football scholarship to Columbia University, but first, he had to attend a year of preparatory school at the Horace Mann School for Boys in the Bronx. So, at the age of 17, Kerouac packed his bags and moved to New York City, where he was immediately awed by the limitless new experiences of big city life.

Of the many wonderful new things Kerouac discovered in New York, and perhaps the most influential on his life was jazz. He described the feeling of walking past a jazz club in Harlem: "Outside, in the street, the sudden music which comes from the nitespot fills you with yearning for some intangible joy—and you feel that it can only be found within the smoky confines of the place.

He worked as a reporter for the Horace Mann Record and published short stories in the school's literary magazine, the Horace Mann Quarterly. The following year, inKerouac began his freshman year as a football player and aspiring writer at Columbia University. However, he broke his leg in one of his first games and was relegated to the sidelines for the rest of the season.

Jack kerouac a biography of albert: Jack Kerouac was an American

Although his leg had healed, Kerouac's coach refused to let him play the next year, and Kerouac impulsively quit the team and dropped out of college. His cause of death was listed as an internal hemorrhage bleeding esophageal varices caused by cirrhosisthe result of longtime alcohol abuse. His mother, Gabrielle, inherited most of his estate.

Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of jazz, especially the bebop genre established by Charlie ParkerDizzy GillespieThelonious Monkand others. Later, he included ideas he developed from his Buddhist studies that began with Gary Snyder. He often referred to his style as "spontaneous prose". This approach is reflected also by his plot structure: his narratives were not heavily focused on traditional plot structures.

Instead, his works often revolved around a series of episodic encounters, road trips, and personal reflections.

Jack kerouac a biography of albert: Kerouac was born in

The emphasis was on the characters' experiences and the exploration of themes such as freedom, rebellion, and the search for meaning. The central features of this writing method were the ideas of breath borrowed from jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathingimprovising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and limited revision.

Connected with this idea of breath was the elimination of the periodsubstituting instead a long connecting dash. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words take on a certain musical rhythm and tempo. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder, and includes excerpts of letters from Snyder.

Allen Ginsberg, initially unimpressed, would later be one of his great proponents, and it was Kerouac's free-flowing prose method that inspired the composition of Ginsberg's poem Howl. It was at about the time of The Subterraneans that he was encouraged by Ginsberg and others to formally explain his style.

Jack kerouac a biography of albert: The celebrated British music journalist and

Of his expositions of the spontaneous prose method, the most concise was "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose", a list of 30 "essential" maxims. Truman Capote said of it, "That's not writing, it's typing". The existence of his two novels written in French, La nuit est ma femme and Sur le chemin was revealed to the general public in a series of articles published by journalist Gabriel Anctil, in the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir in and The novella, completed in five days in Mexico during Decemberis a telling example of Kerouac's attempts at writing in his first language, a language he often called Canuck French.

Kerouac refers to this short novel in a letter addressed to Neal Cassady who is commonly known as the inspiration for the character Dean Moriarty dated January 10, The published novel runs over pages, having been reconstituted from six distinct files in the Kerouac archive by Professor Cloutier. Set inmostly on the East Coast, it explores some of the recurring themes of Kerouac's literature by way of a spoken word narrative.

Here, as with most of his French writings, Kerouac writes with little regard for grammar or spelling, often relying on phonetics in order to render an authentic reproduction of the French-Canadian vernacular. Even though this work has the same title as one of his best known English novels, it is the original French version of an incomplete translation that later became Old Bull in the Bowery now published in The Unknown Kerouac from the Library of America.

La nuit est ma femme was written in early and completed a few days or weeks before he began the original English version of On the Road, as many scholars, such as Paul Maher Jr. Influences [ edit ] Kerouac's early writing, particularly his first novel The Town and the City, was more conventional, and bore the strong influence of Thomas Wolfe.

The technique Kerouac developed that later gained him notoriety was heavily influenced by jazz, especially Bebopand later, Buddhism, as well as the Joan Anderson letter written by Neal Cassady. This was his sole reading on Desolation Peak, and he hoped by this means to condition his mind to emptinessand possibly to have a vision.

It is like Ulysses and should be treated with the same gravity. This is especially so with members of the band the Doors, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarekwho quote Jack Kerouac and his novel On the Road as one of the band's greatest influences. The first forms of jazz were formed in New Orleans from a melange of blues, work songs, marches, work songs, African and European music.

Jack kerouac a biography of albert: Jack Kerouac (), the central figure

Bop—the form of jazz that most influenced Kerouac—was created by African-American musicians in New York basements between and Bop arose as a reaction to the perception of musical theft perpetrated by white entertainers e. He did not speak English until he was five years old, using instead a combination of French and English used by the many French-Canadians who settled in New England.

Kerouac's older brother Gerard died at age nine; he also had an older sister. At age eleven Kerouac began writing novels and made-up accounts of horse races, football games, and baseball games. In Kerouac arrived at Columbia but broke his leg in the second game of the season. After the injury he began to pursue his true passion—literature.

Kerouac began to cut class regularly; he studied the style of writer Thomas Wolfe — and hung out on the New York City streets. In Kerouac had an argument with Columbia's football coach and left school. Outside influences Kerouac worked briefly at a gas station and as a sports reporter for a newspaper in Lowell. He then signed on to work aboard the S.

Dorchester bound for Greenland. After that trip Kerouac returned to Columbia for a short stay. In he joined the Navy, but he was honorably discharged after six months. Kerouac spent the war years working as a merchant seaman and hanging Jack Kerouac.