Jack Kerouac is widely credited with starting the Beat Movement
-
Jack Kerouac is widely credited with starting the Beat Movement, a vital, modernist force in literature that had its roots in the post-war 1950s. His influences were the earlier authors and poets who had, in the previous century, questioned and celebrated American life in equal measure: Henry David Thoreau, the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and especially Walt Whitman.
It is difficult now to imagine the power of the Beat movement in the 1950s and 60s. Free from conventional restraints, the engineers of the movement ignited a cultural firestorm that encompassed not only literature, but also the entire youth culture. Kerouac’s fame reached such heights after the publication of On the Road that he became reluctant to leave the small house in Orlando that he had retreated to.
-
Kerouac ushered in an urgent and stream of consciousness style of writing that questioned nearly every aspect of modern life while celebrating the seedier aspects of it. He embraced Buddhism and meditation, while drinking and brawling his way across the United States. He yearned for the jazz rhythms of New York’s nightlife, but fled to the woods of Northern California for extended lengths of time, writing heavily in solitude and isolation. The young man who won a free ride to Columbia University as a small-town football hero railed against conformity in both action and written word. He was the world’s most well known author, yet he lived in poverty his entire life.
-
The yearning for adventure and search for self so evident in his writing is a hallmark of young adulthood; his message of freedom and questioning authority resonates as much today as it did more than 50 years ago when On the Road was published. All of his novels remain in print and are a mainstay on high school and college reading lists. Even today, On the Road sells approximately 100,000 copies a year.
In 2007, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of On the Road’s publication, Viking released an anniversary edition, the Library of American included it in a collection of Kerouac novels, and the New York Public Library exhibited the original 120 ft. long scroll Kerouac used to write On the Road.
-
The scroll is now owned by Indiana Colts owner Jim Irsay, who purchased it for $2.3 million and toured around the United States with it. Many of the people who purchase On the Road find themselves in St. Petersburg on a quest to seek out the home of the man who inspired them. The mailbox hanging on the porch of the unassuming brick house is filled with handwritten notes and gifts from pilgrims who have made their way to their hero’s home. It’s not unusual to drive by and find solitary young seekers sitting on the front steps, penning their own missives to non-conformity and youthful idealism.
His legacy lives on in celebrations and memorials around the world.
-
Kerouac’s birthplace in Lowell, MA is the home of the annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac festival, which draws thousands of people to the small industrial city for walking tours, birthday celebrations, readings, musical performances and academic symposiums.
In 1974 Allen Ginsberg opened the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics opened at Nairopa University, a private Buddhist university in Boulder, Colorado. The school offers a BA in Writing and Literature, MFAs in Writing & Poetics and Creative Writing, and a summer writing program
-
In 1997, The Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence Project of Orlando, Inc. purchased the home on Clouster Ave. where he lived upon publication of On the Road. He wrote Dharma Bums there in the year after he became famous; today the home provides opportunities for aspiring writers to live in the same house in which Kerouac was inspired, with room and board covered for three months
St. Petersburg, the city where Kerouac lived, wrote and died, is now poised to take her rightful place as a meaningful stop in the life of one of American’s most celebrated writers.