American novelist and poet, leading figure and spokesman of the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac's search for spiritual liberation produced his best known work, the autobiographical novel On the Road (1957). This first beat novel was based on Kerouac's travels across America with his friend Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty in the story). Its importance was compared to Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, generally seen as the testament of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s.

"I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles.." (from On the Road, Penguin Books, 1976, p. 1)

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the third child of working-class French-Canadian èmigrés. His father, Leo, owned a print shop – he died of stomach cancer in 1946. Kerouac learned English as a second language, and first the French-Canadian dialect joual. When he was four, his beloved older brother Gerard died. Throughout his life, Kerouac believed that Gerard followed him as a guardian angel.

Kerouac received his early education from Jesuits. In high school he was a star athlete. In 1939 Kerouac entered Columbia University on a football scholarship, but soon dropped out and joined the Navy. Lacking the capacity of subordination he was discharged during World War II on psychiatric grounds. To a Navy shrink he said that the only thing he believed was "absolute personal freedom at all times."

Kerouac served as a merchant seaman and roamed United States and Mexico, but he had already decided to become a writer. During this period he wrote the unpublished The Sea Is My Brother, about his maritime adventures. The Town & City (1950), his first novel, was an account of the decline of his own family. It received good reviews but Kerouac judged the book as a failure.

Of all Beat writers, Kerouac was the one who was most affected by jazz. Many superb  observations about the Bebop scene, the spontaneity and rough energy of the music, are scattered in Kerouac's writings. "I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday," he said in the note of Mexico City Blues (1959). "I take 242 choruses; my ideas vary and sometimes roll from chorus to chorus or from halfway through a chorus to halfway into the next." (Ibid., Grove Press, 1990) His heroes were Charlie Parker ("Musically as important as Beethoven / Yet not regarded as such at all" - '240th Chorus'), Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonius Monk.

While hanging around Columbia campus in 1944, Kerouac began to mix with a group of New York based intellectuals, such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, whose Bohemian life style and search for new philosophy had a profound impact on him. Usually they met in the apartment of Joan Wollmer, the daughter of a factory manager, and Edie Palmer. Burroughs accidentally shot Vollmer in Mexico City in 1951. For a short time Kerouac was married with Edie, who earned $27,50 a week as a cigarette girl and shared this sum with him. A prostitute named Vickie Russell showed the group how to make lozenges or tea from the papers in Benzedrine inhalers. Kerouac was hospitalized after excessive use of Benzedrine. Most of his life he was addicted to the drug.

The poet Diane di Prima, who became friends of the "new bohemians," described later in her erotic autobiography Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969) an orgy involving Kerouac, Ginsberg, herself: "Allen set things going by largely and fully embracing all of us, each in turn and all at once, sliding from body to body in a great wallow of flesh. It was warm and friendly and very unsexy—like being in a bathtub with four other people. To make matters worse, I had my period, and was acutely aware of the little white string of a tampax sticking out of my cunt." (Ibid., Last Gasp of San Francisco, 1988, p. 131) Kerouac's second wife was Joan Virginia Haverty, whom he encouraged to write. The marriage lasted eight months. Joan refused to abort their unplanned child, Jan. Kerouac did not meet her until she was ten. Joan adopted writing as a tool to deal with issues that were important to her, but she destroyed most of her texts. Her unfinished autobiography, Nobody's Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats, came out in 2000. Jan Kerouac published her first novel, Baby Driver, in 1981. 

In the early 1950s, Kerouac took a job in Washington State with the U.S. Forest Service as a fire watcher in a one-room fire lookout. In 1957, nine months before becoming famous with the publication of On the Road, he had an affair with Joyce Johnson (Glassman), who recalled their relationship in Door Wide Open (2000). She was twenty-one. On the night of their first blind date in January 1957, Kerouac couldn't even afford to buy her a cup of coffee. "He told me how he'd promised his father that someday he'd buy his mother a house—maybe he'd really be able to do that eventually. He also hoped critics would admire his breakthrough into spontaneous, unfettered prose." (Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958 by Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson, with an introduction and commentary by Joyce Johnson, Viking, 2000, p. 5) Kerouac moved to her apartment, which she shared with a tomcat named Smoke; he called it Ti Gris, after a cat he once had in Lowell. Johnson later recalled that as a lover he was somewhat reticent. Kerouac did not like blondes.

As a writer Johnson did not gain such fame as the young men of the beat generation, proving perhaps with her fate the masculine character of the movement. "But with you—I felt as though nothing could touch me, and if anything would happen, the Hell wit it," she said in July 1957 in a letter to Kerouac. "You don't know what narror lives we girls have, how few real andventures there are for them; misadventures, yes. like abortions and little men following them in subways, buit seldom anything like seeing ships at night. So that's why we've all taken off like this, and that's also part of why I love you." (Door Wide Open, p. 42)

On the Road was inspired by the drug-fuelled cross-country car rides that Kerouac made with Neal Cassady (1926-1968). The narrator, Sal Paradise, accompanies his friends on four separate trips as they spend time in Colorado, California, Virginia, New York and Mexico. Carlo Marx is Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady is Dean Moriarty, who tells Sal: ". . . I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it is the same in every corner. I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side." (Ibid. p. 121) William S. Burroughs, who used the pseudonym of William Lee when discussing his heroin addiction, was Old Bull Lee – "let's just say now, he was a teacher, and it may be said that he had every right to teach because he spent all his time learning; and the things he learned were what he considered to be and called "the facts of life," which he learned not only out of necessity but because he wanted to." (Ibid., p. 143)

The headlong style of the narrator underlines the description of lifestyle based on beauty, alcohol, jazz, sex, drugs, and mysticism. Sitting at his kitchen table on West 20th Street, Kerouac finished the book over a period of just 20 days on a single roll of telegraph paper. In the manic process he reinvented "automatic writing," which had marked the work of Surrealistic circles in Paris in the 1920s.

On the Road presented a new, spontaneous, unpolished style, the "sound of the mind." It appealed subculture folksingers, hipsters, mystics, and writers. Truman Capote condemned to work, "That's not writing, that's typewriting," but it made Kerouac celebrated television personality and Neal Cassidy a model for an alternative lifestyle.

The term "beat" – the source of the word "beatnik" – is generally believed to have been coined by Jack Kerouac. (Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by J. A. Cuddon, revised by C. E. Preston, Penguin Books, 1999, p. 78) Originally the term meant "weary". It was later connected to jazz music too. The Beat writers developed their own slang. They rebelled against the conformity of 1950s society, its materialism and middle-class values. "Beat" appeared in Norman Mailer's essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (1957): "I have jotted down perhaps a dozen words, the Hip perhaps most in use and most likely to last with the minimum of variation. The words are man, go, put down, make, beat, cool, swing, with it, crazy, dig, creep, hip, square. They serve a variety of purposes and the nuances of the voice uses the nuance of the situation to convey the subtle contextual difference." (The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Essays, selected, with a foreword and notes by Ian Hamilton, Penguin Books, 1999, p. 366)

Just before the publication of On the Road, Burroughs went with Ginsberg to Tangiers, where Burroughs wrote his most famous novel, The Naked Lunch. Kerouac's The Dharma Bums (1958) paved way for Buddhism as the philosophy for the bohemian artists' communities of San Francisco's North Beach, southern California's Venice West, and New York City's Greenwich Village. Many of the poets of the Beat school tried their hand at haiku, but according to Ginsberg, Kerouac was the only one who produced good pieces, referring to one of his friend's three-line poems: "In my medicine cabinet, / the winter fly / had died of old age."  ('Intersecting Influences in American Haiku' by Tom Lynch, in Modernity in East-West Literary Criticism: New Readings, edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani, 2001, pp. 123-124) The Dharma Bums contained a portrait of the poet Gary Snyder, on whom the character Jaffe Ryder was based. Like Snyder, he writes haiku. As a matter of fact, haiku came to the West Coast poets through Snyder, who was inspired by D. T. Suzuki's Essay in Zen Buddhism (1927) and traveled in Japan in the early 1950s. Kerouac himself emphasized in his 1968 Paris Review interviews, that he was a serious Buddhist, but not a Zen Buddhist. ('Introduction: The Haiku Poetics of Jack Kerouac' by Regina Weinreich, in Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac, 2003, pp. xii-xiv)

The protagonist is Ray Smith, whose friend Japhy Ryder sees a vision of "a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming all that crap they didn't really want anyway, such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least fancy new cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume . . . " (Ibid., Andre Deutsch, 1973, p. 97) Smith starts to meditate, he rejects the society, and then returns to the world: "The vision of the freedom of eternity was mine forever. The chipmunk ran into the rocks m a butterfly came out. It was as simple as that." (Ibid., p. 243)

Disappointed by the way his books were misunderstood Kerouac retired to childhood town of Lowell. There he was looked after by his mother, Gabrielle, known as "Mémêre." When she had a paralysing stroke, Kerouac nursed her.

Kerouac felt his role as a spokesman for the beat generation something of a burden, but occasionally participated to the cross-country adventures. More regularly he visited his home town's bars and clubs. He also married a local girl Stella Sampas, the older sister of his best friend from childhood. During these years he wrote a series of autobiographical novels. Trying to stop his nightly ramblings, she hide his shoes. Kerouac went out anyway.

Visions of Gerard (1963) was based on Kerouac's childhood and depicted the last months in the life of the narrator's 9-year-old brother Gerard. "It is as though Kerouac believes that if only one were to write really bad prose, the result, with any kind of luck at all, would be literature, and disturbingly beautiful," wrote Saul Maloff in the New York Times. (September 8, 1963). Satori in Paris (1966) was an account of his quest for his Breton ancestors. "Somewhere during my ten days in Paris (and Brittany) I received an illumination of some kind that seems to've changed me again, towards what I suppose'll be my pattern for another seven years or more: in effect, a satori: the Japanese word for "sudden illumination," "sudden awakening" or simply "kick in the eye."" (Ibid., Grove Press, 1966, p. 7)

The Subterraneans (1958) was written in three days with the help of Benzedrine. It was an account of Kerouac's – Leo Percepied in the book – affair with Mardou Fox, a mulatto woman. Critics were not happy with its disintegration of syntax. In Big Sur (1962) Kerouac's alter ego was Jack Duluoz. The book was part of the author's massive series The Duluoz Legend, in which he told the story of his life from 1922 to the summer of 1965.

Kerouac suffered abdominal hemorrhage whilst vomiting in his lavatory and died at home on October 21, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida. A few month earlier Neal Cassady's nude corpse had been discovered in Mexico. Kerouac's novel Visions of Cody was published posthumously in 1972, but it was composed already in 1951-52.

When his friends did not like On the Road, Kerouac started to write inserts to patch up the work. These grew into a new book. Ginsberg considered it a "holy mess,"but  he did not change its rambling style and discontinuous structure which had the improvisational quality of jazz. New Directions published short selections from it in 1959, rest of the work was rejected as pornographic. Orpheus Emerged (2000), the first full-length work of fiction after Vision of Cody, appeared in digital format. The novella was originally completed in 1945; in the new format the work includes also an introduction by the poet and scholar Robert Creeley, photographs, biography of the author, excerpts from Kerouac's journals, bibliographies, etc.

For further reading: Kerouac: A Biography by A Charters (1973); Jack Kerouac by R.A. Hipkiss (1976); Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac by B. Gifford and L. Lee (1978); "On the Road": Text and Criticism, edited by S. Donaldson (1979); The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac: A Study of the Fiction by Regina Weinreich (1987); Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac by Gerald Nicosia (1994); Women of the Beat Generation by Brenda Knight (1996); Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction by James T. Jones (1999); Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958 by Joyce Johnson (2000); Nobody's Wife by Joan Haverty Kerouac (2000); Jack Kerouac's On the Road, edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom (2004); Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road by Isaac Gewirtz (2008); Jack Kerouac and the Traditions of Classic and Modern Haiku by Yoshinobu Hakutani (2018); The Paradox of Thanatos: Jack Kerouac & Allen Ginsberg: From Self-destruction to Self-liberation by Tanguy Harma (2022); Becoming Kerouac: A Writer in His Time by Paul Maher Jr. (2023)

Selected works:

• The Town & City, 1950
• On the Road, 1957
  - Matkalla (suom. Markku Lahtela, 1964)
  - Film 2012, prod. MK2 Productions, Film4, SPAD Films, screenplay Jose Rivera, dir. Walter Salles, starring Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen
• The Dharma Bums, 1958
  - Dharmapummit (suom. Markus Jääskeläinen, 2001)
• The Subterraneans, 1958
  - Maanalaiset (suom. Kimmo Lilja, 2002)
• The Floating World, 1959
• Mexico City Blues, 1959
• Excerpts from Visions of Cody, 1959
• Maggie Cassidy, 1959
• Doctor Sax, 1959
• The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, 1960
• Lonesome Traveler, 1960 (drawings by Larry Rivers)
  - Yksinäinen matkamies (suom. Elina Koskelin, 2005)
• Tristessa, 1960
  - Tristessa (suom. Elina Koskelin, Seppo Lahtinen ja Vesa-Matti Paija, 2006)
• Pull My Daisy, 1961 (text ad-libbed by Jack Kerouac for the film by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, introd. by Jerry Tallmer)
• Book of Dreams, 1961
• Big Sur, 1962
  - Tuuliajolla Big Surissa (suom. Markus Jääskeläinen, 2002)
• Visions of Gerard, 1963
• Desolation Angels, 1965 (introd. by Seymour Krim)
  - Desolationin enkelit (suom. Jaakko Yli-Juonikas, 2004)
• Satori in Paris, 1966
• Some of the Dharma, 1997
• Vanity of Duloutz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46 , 1968
  - Turha mies Duluoz (suom. 2009)
• Pic: A Novel, 1971
• Scattered Poems, 1971
• Visions of Cody, 1972 (introd. by Allen Ginsberg)
• Home at Christmas, 1973
• Trip Trap: Haiku along the Road from San Francisco to New York, 1959, 1973 (with Albert Saijo and Lew Welch, with recollections by Albert Saijo and Lew Welch)
• Two Early Stories, 1973
• Junk, 1976
• Heaven & Other Poems, 1977
• Hymn: God Pray for Me, 1985
• American Haikus, 1986
• Pomes All Sizes, 1992 (introduction by Allen Ginsberg)
• Good Blonde & Others, 1993 (edited by Donald Allen, preface by Robert Creeley)
• Old Angel Midnight, 1993 (edited by Donald Allen, prefaces by Ann Charters & Michael McClure)
• The Portable Jack Kerouac, 1995 (edited by Ann Charters)
• Selected Letters, 1940-1956, 1995 (edited with an introduction and commentary by Ann Charters)
• Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings, 1999 (edited with an introduction and commentary by Paul Marion)
• Selected Letters, 1957-1969, 1999 (edited with an introduction and commentary by Ann Charters)
• Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958 / Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson, 2000 (with an introduction and commentary by Joyce Johnson)
• Orpheus Emerged, 2000 (published in digital format by LiveREADS)
• Book of Haikus, 2003 (ed. by Regina Weinreich)
  - Haikujen kirja (suom. Arto Lappi, 2006)
• Departed angels: [the lost paintings], 2004 (text by Ed Adler)
• Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947-1954, 2004 (ed. by Douglas Brinkley
• Beat Generation: 3-Act Play, 2005 (introduction by A.M. Homes)
• Book of Sketches, 1952-57, 2006 (introduction by George Condo)
• On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007
  - Matkalla: alkuperäinen versio (suom. Markku Lahtela, Markus Jääskeläinen, 2007)
• Road Novels, 1957-1960, 2007 (edited by Douglas Brinkley)
• And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, 2008 (with William S. Burroughs, written in 1945)
  - Ja virtahevot kiehuivat altaissaan (suom. 2010)
• Getting Inside Jack Kerouac's Head, 2009 (edited by Nick Thurston ; introduction by Kenneth Goldsmith)
• You're a Genius All the Time: Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, 2009 (foreword by Regina Weinreich)
• Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, 2010 (edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford)
• The Sea is My Brother, 2012 (introduction by Dawn Ward)
• The Haunted Life: And Other Writings, 2014 (edited by Todd Tietchen)
  
• The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings, 2016 (Todd Tietchen, editor; Jean-Christophe Cloutier, translator)
• Desolation Peak: Collected Works, 2022 (edited by Charles Shuttleworth)
  
• Truth and Beautiful Meaningful Lies: A Collection of Jack Kerouac Quotes, 2023 (edited by Sylvia Cunha and Jim Sampas) .