Kerouac :: essays research papers

Born on March 12, 1922, the youngest of three children in a French-Canadian family that had established itself in Lowell, Massachusetts, trap Kerouac was by the age of ten already aiming to become a writer. His father ran a print shop and published a local newsletter called the Spotlight. originally long he began writing and producing his own sport sheet, which he sold to friends and acquaintances in Lowell. He attended both Catholic and public schools, and won acrobatic scholarships to the Horace Mann prep school (in New York) and then to Columbia University. In New York he fell in with fellow literary-icons-to-be Allen Ginsberg, the poet, and William S. Burroughs, the novelist. A broken leg hobbled his college football career, and Kerouac quit Columbia in his sophomore year, eventually joining the merchant marine and then Navy (from which he was discharged). Thus began the restless wandering that would characterise both his legacy and his life.To Kerouac, Beat a shorthand term for beatitude and the idea that the downtrodden are saintly was not round 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 The thirty published and unpublished books he wrote from 1941 to 1969 include Kerouacs thirteen-volume, more or less autobiographical Legend of Duluoz a study of a particular lifetime, his own, in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 myth compelr 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 die yelling and laughing, Kerouac wrote in his diary in 1949. And that until then Ill rush around this world I insist in holy and pull 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 depict his fascinatingly inchoate friend Neal Cassady as the modern-day equivalent of the Wild West legends Jim Bridger, Pecos Bill, and Jesse James. Like the Lowell boy he never quite ceased to be, Kerouac saw football players and range-worn cowboys as the paragons of true America his diaries germinate with references to folk heroes and praise for Zane Greys honest drifters, Herman Melvilles confidence men, and Babe Ruths feats on the diamond and in the barroom. Kerouac brought Cassady into the American mythologic pantheon as the mad Ahab at the wheel, compelling others to join his roaring drive across Walt Whitmans patchwork Promise Land.