Notes For March 12th, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On March 12th, 1922, the legendary American writer Jack Kerouac was born. He was born Jean-Louis Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French Canadian parents who had emigrated from Quebec. They called him "Ti Jean," which meant "little Jean."
Kerouac's parents were both devout Catholics and ferocious anti-Semites. In an interview with the Paris Review, Kerouac recalled a time when his father assaulted a rabbi for allegedly disrespecting him.
When Jack Kerouac was four years old, his older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine, which he would write about in his 1963 novel, Visions of Gerard.
The loss of his brother would have a profound effect on him. He didn't speak English until he was six years old and began formal schooling. He continued to speak French at home.
As a teenager, Jack's athletic talents led him to become a hurdler on the high school track team and a running back on the football team. His football skills earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Columbia University, and Notre Dame.
He went to Columbia. During his freshman year, he cracked a tibia playing football and argued constantly with his coach, Lou Little, who kept him on the bench. So, he dropped out of university.
Kerouac moved to New York City, where he would meet his friends and fellow Beat writers William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and Herbert Huncke. He began a relationship with Edie Parker, whose friend and roommate, Joan Vollmer, would later marry Burroughs.
Kerouac joined the Merchant Marine in 1942. A year later, he joined the Navy and was honorably discharged - for psychiatric reasons. They diagnosed him as having a schizoid personality. By 1944, he was back in New York, where he found himself caught up in a murder.
His friend, Lucien Carr, called him for help after killing another friend, David Kammerer. When Carr, who was not gay, spurned Kammerer's sexual advances and declarations of love, the obsessed Kammerer refused to take no for an answer and stalked him relentlessly.
Carr stabbed him to death, allegedly in self-defense, but was afraid to call the police. So, Kerouac helped him dispose of the evidence and dump Kammerer's body in the Hudson River. Later, on the advice of William Burroughs, Kerouac and Carr turned themselves in.
Jack's father refused to pay his bail and disowned him. His girlfriend Edie's parents bailed him out on the condition that he marry her, so he did. Since Kammerer was seen as a disturbed, predatory homosexual, Carr served just a brief sentence for covering up the killing.
Kerouac, who had been charged as a material witness and possible accessory, was cleared of wrongdoing. Free of legal trouble, Jack began his literary career. He collaborated on a novel with William Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.
A fictionalized account of the killing of David Kammerer, it wouldn't be published in its entirety until 2008 - a raw early work featuring the burgeoning talents of Burroughs and Kerouac, whose parents moved to Queens. Jack lived with them after his marriage ended in an annulment.
Kerouac kept writing, and soon completed his first solo novel, The Town and the City, which was published in 1950 under the name John Kerouac. The epic autobiographical novel of life in rural Massachusetts, like his future works, employed a stream-of-consciousness narrative, but was not nearly as experimental.
The epic novel was cut by 400 pages prior to publication during the editing process. The reviews were good, but the novel sold poorly. Lack of commercial success failed to discourage Kerouac. On the contrary; he vowed to never again compromise his artistic vision for commercial success. He wrote constantly, both at home and while traveling the country in search of himself.
By 1951, Kerouac was living in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty. He completed the first draft of his second novel, which would go through many changes and become his greatest work. Early titles included The Beat Generation and Gone On The Road.
To write this novel, Kerouac used a new technique, one that he would continue to employ. He typed the manuscript on one long roll of paper instead of separate sheets. He did this because he found that pausing to load new sheets into his typewriter interfered with the flow of his writing, a style he called spontaneous prose.
He defined that vision in his classic essay, Essentials of Spontaneous Prose (1950), likening it to his favorite music, bebop jazz, which possessed a remarkably expressive fluidity despite its experimental, improvised nature. Not everybody got it; Truman Capote famously said of it, "That's not writing, that's typing."
It took a long time for Kerouac to get the novel published; its style was experimental and it painted a sympathetic portrait of minorities suffering from racist persecution. Editors were also uncomfortable with its graphic sexual content (which included both straight and gay sex scenes) and depictions of drug use.
Meanwhile, Kerouac's pregnant wife left him. She gave birth to his only child, a daughter named Jan, but he refused to accept that she was his daughter until she was nine years old and a blood test proved his paternity.
Not long after his daughter was born, Kerouac took off and spent several years traveling extensively throughout the U.S. and Mexico. During this time, he wrote extensively and fell into periods of depression accompanied by heavy drug and alcohol abuse.
In 1954, Kerouac came across Dwight Goddard's book, A Buddhist Bible, in a public library. It began his nearly lifelong interest in Buddhism. A year later, he wrote a biography of the Buddha, Wake Up, which would be published posthumously, in a serialized version, by Tricycle: The Buddhist Review from 1993-95.
In 1957, after being rejected numerous times over the last several years, Kerouac's second novel, the classic On The Road, was bought by Viking Press. They demanded major revisions, which included removing most of the sexual content.
Based on Kerouac's travels throughout America and Mexico with his best friend, Beat icon and future Merry Prankster Neal Cassady, the novel told the story of two disillusioned young men in postwar America embarking on an existentialist journey in search of themselves.
Along the way, they make friends, enjoy the pleasures of wine, women, grass, and jazz, and earn a few bucks to keep the trip going. In the end, the narrator finds himself and settles down with his true love, but his self-absorbed best friend hits the road again for more kicks.
Since Kerouac had used the real names of his relatives and friends, his publisher, fearing lawsuits, demanded that he use pseudonyms. So, Kerouac became Sal Paradise and Neal Cassady became Dean Moriarty. Allen Ginsberg was named Carlo Marx, and William Burroughs became Old Bull Lee.
The publication of On The Road brought Kerouac rave reviews, good money, and nearly overnight fame. He was dubbed "the king of the Beat generation." He soon developed a distaste for celebrity, as not everyone appreciated his novel.
Conservatives believed that On The Road was the bible of immorality and despised its popularity with young people. Once, Kerouac was attacked outside a bar in New York by three conservative men who accused him of corrupting the youth of America. They beat him savagely.
Nonetheless, his celebrity continued to grow. In 1959, he made a memorable appearance on The Steve Allen Show, reading from On The Road and an early novel, Visions Of Cody. Allen accompanied him on the piano.
During the years Kerouac traveled before the publication of On The Road, he had written the first drafts of what would become his next ten novels. He continued to work on them. His classic novel The Dharma Bums was published in 1958.
Also autobiographical, the novel follows Ray Smith (Kerouac) as he goes on a journey in search of enlightenment, which he finds while communing with the outdoors, (hiking, bicycling, and mountain climbing) traveling aimlessly, and discovering jazz clubs, poetry readings, drunken parties, and of course, Buddhism.
The existentialist novel is most famous for Kerouac's depiction of the legendary 1955 Six Gallery Reading in San Francisco, where the East and West coast factions of Beat literati met to read their works.
The co-promoter of the event was Kerouac's friend, legendary poet Allen Ginsberg, who performed his first public reading of his celebrated classic poem, Howl, which appears in the novel as Wail.
The Dharma Bums became a huge hit with literary critics and readers, who rightfully declared it Kerouac's second masterpiece. Unfortunately, the novel was rejected by the leaders of the American Buddhist community.
Disillusioned and depressed, Kerouac abandoned Buddhism and returned to Catholicism. To care for his elderly mother and escape his celebrity, he moved to Northport, New York. He continued to write and published a succession of memorable novels.
These included Visions Of Cody, Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Lonesome Traveler, and Big Sur. He also wrote collections of poetry.
As a poet, Kerouac was famous for making the Japanese haiku popular in America. His haiku did not follow the traditional three line, seventeen syllable structure, as he knew that more words could be formed in seventeen English syllables than in seventeen Japanese syllables.
He wrote his haiku shorter to make them more authentic. His 1959 spoken word album, Blues and Haikus, featured a lengthy reading of haiku, accompanied by the jazz riffs of legendary saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims.
In the 1960s - the last years of his life - Kerouac's drinking problem grew worse. A symbol of the rebellious, free spirited, and disaffected youth whose writings defined one generation (the Beats) and set the stage for the next, (the Hippies) Kerouac changed dramatically.
Too old to hit the road again, not knowing what to do with his life, bitter, and suffering from depression and the ravages of his increasingly severe alcoholism, he crashed, burned, and plunged into a quagmire.
In recent years, scholars have speculated that Jack Kerouac's downfall was the end product of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) resulting from multiple head injuries. When he played football in college, he suffered a concussion so severe that he was knocked unconscious. When he woke up, he didn't know who or where he was, or what he was doing on the field.
It wasn't until after he'd taken that horrific beating outside the bar in New York, which included having his head slammed repeatedly into the pavement by the conservative thugs who attacked him, that his friends began to notice startling changes in his behavior.
The formerly shy, quiet, fun loving and sweet-natured writer began suffering severe mood swings which ranged from sudden outbursts of rage to crippling depression with unexplained crying jags that could last all night. He was coming apart at the seams and it only got worse. His alcohol and drug use escalated alarmingly.
In a letter to a friend, Kerouac himself wrote, "I think I got brain damage."
He had become as fanatically devout a Catholic as his mother and politically conservative. He denounced the hippies, supported the Vietnam War, and befriended conservative icon William F. Buckley. Though he never inherited his parents' racial prejudices, he did inherit their hatred of communists.
After his mother died, a devastated Kerouac drank harder than ever, consuming a large quantity of alcohol every day. On October 21st, 1969, he was rushed to the hospital after he began hemorrhaging from cirrhosis - veins in his esophagus had burst.
Jack Kerouac died the classic drunkard's death, drowning in his own blood at the age of 47. He had said, "I'm Catholic and I can't commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death." Which is exactly what he did.
In 2007, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Kerouac's classic novel, Viking Press finally published the original, unexpurgated version of On The Road. The novel would finally be adapted as a feature film in 2012.
Quote Of The Day
"I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures."
- Jack Kerouac
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 50-minute documentary on Jack Kerouac. Enjoy!
