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Definition: Kerouac, Jack from Philip's Encyclopedia

US poet and novelist. Kerouac published his first novel, The Town and the City, in 1950, but it was On the Road (1957) that established him as the leading novelist of the beat movement. Later works include The Dharma Bums (1958), Desolation Angels (1965) and the posthumously published Visions of Cody (1972).

Kerouac, Jack

From Encyclopedia of American Urban History
Born in a French Canadian Catholic family in Lowell, Massachusetts, on March 12, 1922, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac (1922-1969) spoke French before learning English in public school. Kerouac entered Columbia University in 1940 on a football scholarship, but when he broke his leg and left college, he discovered the Greenwich Village bohemian scene in New York City. After working as a sports reporter for the Lowell Sun , he joined the Merchant Marines (1942) and served briefly in the U.S. Navy. After World War II, Kerouac led the nomadic existence recorded in his autobiographical 1957 novel, On the Road . It was written rapidly as “spontaneous prose,” like all of his books and poetry, to record his restless trips hitchhiking and driving from New York to San Francisco with his companion Neal Cassady. Dharma Bums (1958), a more conventional novel, describes his search for self-fulfillment through Zen Buddhism. He also wrote poetry in Mexico City Blues (1959) and travel pieces in Lonesome…
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Full text Article Kerouac, Jack. (1922–1969)

From The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism
American novelist influenced by Buddhism. Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to a working-class Quebecois family. His first language was the Quebecois French dialect; he learned English from nuns at the local parish school. An outstanding student and athlete in high school, he accepted an…
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Full text Article Kerouac, Jack (1922–1969)

From Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices
Novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, a central figure in the Beat Generation of writers of the 1950s, was a progenitor of the political and social counterculture of the following decade. His spontaneous, confessional writings, many of them composed under the influence of amphetamines, offered an…
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Full text Article Kerouac

From Merriam-Webster's Collegiate(R) Dictionary Full text Article Biographical Names
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The writer who coined the name Beat Generation and became its leading spokesman was Jack Kerouac. The beat movement, a social and literary experiment, originated in the bohemian artists’ colonies around San Francisco, California, and Greenwich Village in New York City in the late 1950s. Its…
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Full text Article Kerouac, Jack

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
(born March 12, 1922, Lowell, Mass., U.S.—died Oct. 21, 1969, St. Petersburg, Fla.) U.S. poet and novelist. He was born to a French Canadian family and attended Columbia University, where he met Allen Ginsberg , William S. Burroughs , and others who would become part of the Beat movement , a term…
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Full text Article Kerouac, Jack

From Encyclopedia of American Literature Full text Article Volume 4
Also known as: Jean-Louis Kerouac (b. 1922–d. 1969) American novelist, poet, essayist The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn…
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Full text Article KEROUAC, JACK

From The Reader's Companion to American History
(1922-1969), novelist. Kerouac was an unlikely figure to become a patron saint of the Beat movement of the 1950s, which his novel On the Road made famous, or of the 1960s counterculture, which he eventually came to despise. He was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac to French-Canadian parents in…
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Full text Article Kerouac, Jack

From A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes
(12 March 1922–21 October 1969; b. Jean-Louis Kérouac) The avant-garde Kerouac is not the chronicler of hitchhiking through America in On the Road (1957) or the embarrassing drunk of his later years, but the author of certain abstract prose in which words are strung together not to describe a…
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Full text Article Kerouac, Jack

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
(John Kerouac)(kĕr'Әwăk´´), 1922–69, American novelist, b. Lowell, Mass., studied at Columbia. One of the leaders of the beat generation , a term he is said to have coined, he was the author of the largely autobiographical novel On the Road (1957), widely considered the testament of the beat…
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Full text Article Jack (Jean Louis) Kerouac (1922–1969)

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
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