Kerouac’s 100th Birthday

During a 1959 Kerouac appearance on Steve Allen’s variety show, the host asked him how he’d define the word: “Beat”.

“Sympathetic,” replied Kerouac.

Jack Kerouac, considered his “true-life” novels as comprising “one vast book like Proust’s except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed,” turns 100 years old on March 12, 2022.

Few 20th-century authors have shaped the American imagination as much—or inspired so many readers, writers, and musicians—as Kerouac. While Kerouac was never comfortable with being considered the “King of the Beats” (indeed, the success of On the Road pretty much ruined his life), that novel, with its classic themes of freedom, longing, and the search for authenticity, helped crystallize a rebellion against the complacency and prosperity of postwar America.

On The Road encouraged people then, and in generations afterwards, to swim against the tide, to do things that weren’t supposed to be done, to seek new experiences.

Kerouac’s story is a pretty sobering one. He was a compelling, complex, and often troubled man. While his writing was spirited, inventive, and revolutionary for its time, it could also sometimes be marred by his misogynistic and bigoted views. Many of his novels were savaged or misunderstood by critics during his lifetime. He became quite embittered, and his alcoholism precipitated his early death at the age of 47 in 1969.

What lives on perhaps more than anything else in his vast body of work is his singular voice, the terrific energy and rhythms of his wordplay, as well as the visceral immediacy and emotional honesty of his writing.

Source: Literary Hub.

A hero of my youth.

He died middle-aged,

a drunk living with his mom.