100 Years of Jack Kerouac
Why he matters now more than ever.
I’ve been bouncing around Jack Kerouac’s books these last three months, reading bits and pieces of everything from The Dharma Bums to his book-length poem Mexico City Blues. This year is the 100th anniversary of his birth and it’s rekindled my intimate connection with Jack. Like so many others, I was a teenager with a dog-eared copy of On the Road in the back pocket of my jeans. Decades later at the age of 55, I was lucky to be awarded a writer residency and took off from my home in the Chicago suburbs to drive to Florida to live and write in Kerouac’s old tin-roof house in Orlando, the one he lived in with his mother just after he became famous and was crowned king of the Beat Generation.
Now I’m thinking hard about Kerouac’s legacy, why he continues to seemingly be both revered and despised. and why he should still matter more than ever.
I have always had an odd kinship with Jack. I was a late-to-the-game hippie when I was in my teens, missing the heart of that movement by a couple of years. Jack and his buddies ushered in the hippies, yet Kerouac was far more conservative as he aged, even supporting the Vietnam War at the time of his death. There’s the story of when his former friend Neal Cassady, (the Dean Moriarty of On the Road) visited him as he traveled with Ken Kesey’s LSD gang of Merry Pranksters…
