Jack Kerouac: A Brief Biography

Jean-Louis “Jack” Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachsetts on March 12, 1922. His parents, Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac, were French-Canadian emigres who met and married in Nashua, New Hampshire. Jack was the youngest of three children, with a sister, Caroline, and a brother Gerard, who died at age nine when Kerouac was four years old.

By the time he reached high school Kerouac showed athletic prowess as well as a love of literature and writing. He graduated with the Class of 1939 from Lowell High School and attended Columbia University, where he’d been recruited to play football. His stay at Columbia was short lived, due in part to his difficulty in adjusting to the structures of academia.

Following his World War II service with the United States Merchant Marine, Kerouac remained in New York where he met up with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes and others who would form the nucleus of what he later termed the “Beat Generation” writers. Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City was published in 1950.

In late 1946 Kerouac met Neal Cassady of Denver, Colorado and San Francisco. Their subsequent travels around the United States and Mexico became the basis for his signature novel On the Road. Written in 1951, the novel was not published until 1957.

The publication of On the Road gave Kerouac both fame and notoriety. He became labeled the much praised, much more maligned, but mostly misunderstood “King of the Beats.”

During the 1960s the dual demons of fame and alcoholism took their toll on Kerouac. He died on October 21, 1969 in St. Petersburg, Florida while living with his third wife, Stella Sampas Kerouac of Lowell, and his mother. He had a daughter, the late Jan Michele Kerouac, from an earlier marriage. A life-long Roman Catholic, Jack Kerouac was give a Catholic Funeral Mass and burial in Lowell.

At the time of his death Kerouac had seen the publication of 18 of his novels and several books of poetry. In more recent years a good portion of his work has been published posthumously.