Jack Kerouac, the novelist who named the Beat Generation and exuberantly celebrated its rejection of middle-class American conventions, died early yesterday of massive abdominal hemorrhaging in a St. Petersburg, Fla., hospital. He was 47 years old.
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time,” he wrote in “On the Road,” a novel he completed in only three weeks but had to wait seven years to see published.
When it finally appeared in 1957, it immediately became a basic text for youth who found their country claustrophobic and oppressive.
Mr. Kerouac’s admirers regarded him as a major literary innovator and something of a religious seer, but this estimate of his achievement never gained wide acceptance among literary tastemakers.
The Beat Generation, originally regarded as a bizarre bohemian phenomenon confined to small coteries in San Francisco and New York, spilled over into the general culture in the nineteen-sixties. But as it became fashionable to be beat, it became less fashionable to read Jack Kerouac.
As he painstakingly informed his readers in his long series of autobiographical works—which he intended to be read, ultimately, in sequence as one novel—Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Mass., on March 12,1922, the son of a French-Canadian printer.
He spoke French before he spoke English and still had an accent when he made up his mind while still in high school to become a major American writer. But it was as a football player, a fast, agile fullback, that he first won any kind of recognition.
In 1939 he entered Horace Mann School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, with the promise of a football scholarship to Columbia University if he could prove himself academically.
His football career ended in spring practice of his freshman year when the coach, Lou Little, (later to appear in a Kerouac novel as “Lu Libble”) told his young fullback to stop malingering after he was injured on a play.
The injury, as Mr. Kerouac told the story, was a broken leg.
He lost his scholarship to Columbia after the career-ending injury, but World War II would have interrupted his studies in any case. He served first in the merchant marine, then briefly in the Navy, from which he was discharged as “a schizoid personality.”
It was immediately after the war that he had had the experiences that shaped him decisively as a writer. He returned to New York and became close to Allen Ginsberg, then a Columbia undergraduate, and William Burroughs, the scion of a wealthy St. Louis family. Mr. Kerouac was later to give them the titles of their best-known works—“Howl” and “Naked Lunch.”
In those years, Mr. Kerouac was constantly on the move, from New York to Denver, then on to San Francisco, down to Mexico City, and back to New York. This was his discovery of America, the basis for “On the Road.”
Much of his traveling was done in the company of a young drifter from Denver named Neal Cassady, who had a hunger for experience and a taste also for theology and literature. Inevitably, he became a main character of “On the Road,” but he became much more—a literary model, supplanting Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway and William Saroyan.
Cassady had never been published, but he wrote voluminous letters —“fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed,” Mr. Kerouac later recalled—that gave the aspiring novelist his idea of spontaneous style. Specifically the inspiration for “On the Road” was a letter from Cassady that ran to 40,000 words.
He shunned literary society and spent most of his last years in a withdrawn existence in places like St. Petersburg, North-port, L. I., and his hometown of Lowell, where he maintained a residence in a ranch-style house with his invalid mother and his third wife, Stella.
World History
