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Pot Belly Jack Kerouac 3"

HB-PBHJK3

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Jack Kerouac, thought of by many as the father of the Beat Movement and who coined the term “beat”, is considered one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century. The innovator of what he called “spontaneous bop prosody”, his frenetic fast-paced writing embodied the energy and spirit of post WW2 youth. Jean-Louis Kerouac, of French Canadian descent, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. He began working for his father in his printing shop at the age of 10, thus beginning his love of the printed word. He attended both Catholic and public schools and was a star athlete. He won a football scholarship to Columbia University, where he fell in with a literary crowd, befriending Alan Ginsberg and William Burroughs. After a leg injury in his sophomore year, he dropped out of Columbia and joined the Merchant Marines. He also joined the Navy but was soon discharged.. Thereafter he roamed the U.S. and Mexico, working at a variety of jobs that included railroader and forest ranger, before he published his first novel, The Town and the City (1950). Dissatisfied with fictional conventions, he developed a new unedited method of writing. On the Road, written in three weeks, was the first product of his new style. The book drew the public’s attention to a subterranean culture of poets, folksingers, hipsters, mystics, and eccentrics, including Neal Cassady and the beat writers Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen. Kerouac's works, including The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958), Doctor Sax (1959), Lonesome Traveler (1960), and Desolation Angels (1965), are autobiographical, and most of them feature other prominent Beat writers as characters. While Kerouac is best known as the Father of the Beats, he didn't follow this lifestyle. He lived with his mother when not traveling, and as many of his friends got involved in the radical politics of the '60s, Kerouac distanced himself from the movement due to his politically conservative views such as his support of the Vietnam War. In his later life, Kerouac became an alcoholic recluse. He died in 1969 at the age of 47.