Narrative: 482 pages.
Several appendices.
Notes: 27 pages.
Index: 33 pages.
The author:
- independent scholar and English instructor in the Greater Lowell area
- teaches a course on Jack Kerouac at Middlesex Community College, Lowell, MA
- working on a biography of Henry David Thoreau and a collection of interviews of Jack Kerouac
- lives in Fitchburg, MA, with his family
Born Centralville, two miles north of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1922. Third of three children, boy-girl-boy. Incredibly poor maternal family. Father, Leo, traveling salesman, based in Lowell, MA, meets his wife-to-be in New Hampshire. Paternal roots go back to France; via Canada. Franco-American, a theme that carries through the book.
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac.
The father, Leo, became a prosperous businessman.
Older brother dies when Jack turns four.
Jack educated in Catholic schools.
Started writing and journaling by the time he was in middle school.
1936: a turn for the worse (after recent depression which seemed never to end)
- Merrimack River floods
- father's gambling habits
- Jack was fourteen
1936: Lowell High School.
Family almost destitute. Jack plays football.
Sexual history begins in high school; begins on page 52 of this book.
Jack kept a diary of every sexual encounter he had in life, in great detail.
Began writing seriously. Authors he read; tried to emulate: Hemingway; William Saroyan, Thomas Wolfe; James Joyce; and, also, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Arthur Rimbaud, and William Blake.
Highly recruited by Boston College, Lowell, MA. Recruited by Columbia, football, not academics.
Chose Columbia.
Part 2: The Dawn of Jazz in America
1939: enrolled at the Horace Mann School for Boys for remedial English and literature, etc., which he needed to complete to get full academic scholarship for football.
1939.
Eager to write and get paid as a writer in NYC.
Wanted to invoke the spirits o William Thackeray, Ben Jonson, Charles Dickens.
Successfully completed his Horace Mann courses and yearbook entry suggested he had a very promising career.
He did not have a wealth or life experiences to dwell on; turned to introspection.
Frantic social milieu of Manhattan.
Befriended Donald Wolf, Henri Cru, and Seymour Wyse -- the latter two, lifelong friends.
Greenwich Village to Harlem; natural for jazz. Becomes big, big piece of the story.
......
Chapter 10: "Among The Philistines" -- March 1943 - November 1944.
- Born in 1922, he would have been about 22 years old
- Still in NYC. This seems to be a pivotal chapter in his coming of age period.
- Meets Burroughs. Met Ginsberg.
Chapter 11: True Thoughts Abound
- begins with "a flood of writing by Kerouac and Ginsberg
- his father Leo dies at this time, 1946
- through a new acquaintance, Hal Chase, at Columbia, Jack meets Neal Cassady, whom Hal considered something of a mad genius -- a propensity for car thefts and womanizing.
- Cassady's sexuality discussed pages 142 - 143
Part 3: Essence of Mind, page 177
Begins in 1949.
On the road again; this time fleeing NYC for New Jersey and points south.
........
Part 4: The Consolidation of Fame, page 305
Begins in 1955.
The sage of Rocky Mount, NC.
Begins with his hitchhiking from Rocky Mount, NC, to Victoria, Texas.
............
Part 5: Ghostly Friend in God
Begins in 1960.
Begins with Vietnam War.
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