Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac
(Jack; Ti-jean)

• School Columbia University
• High School Lowell (MA) High School, Horace Mann School

• Born March 12, 1922 in Lowell, MA USA
• Died October 21, 1969 in St. Petersburg, FL USA

Biographical Information

Tu cherchais qui, tu cherchais quoi
De Lowell, Mass jusqu'à L.A.
Comme un apôtre sans Jésus-Christ
D'un bord à l'autre de ce pays

Richard Séguin: "L'ange vagabond" (1988)

Jack Kerouac is one of the major American writers of the immediate post-World War II period. His novel, On the Road, written in 1951 but published in 1957, is a major milestone in American literature as the touchstone of the "Beat Generation" and a major inspiration for the counterculture of the 1960s.

Kerouac was born in a French Canadian working-class family in Lowell, MA and only spoke French until entering primary school. He escaped his humble beginnings by excelling at sports as a youth, going to Columbia University on a football scholarship. While an injury prevented him from having much of a football career, living and studying in New York, NY put him in touch with some of the underground writers of the period, including novelist William S. Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsberg, and sent him on his own writing career after a brief stint in the merchant marine and in the Naval Reserve during the War.

He began his writing career as a journalist and sports - including baseball - were always a passion. As a youth, he developed his own tabletop baseball game, devising intricate biographies for the fictitious players he created and playing countless games with his friends, and then writing up detailed accounts of the games played in a fictitious newspaper. This hobby is referenced in his novel Desolation Angels (1965). Whenever he would go off the grid during his countless travels across North America and elsewhere, one of his first moves after returning to civilization was checking out issues of The Sporting News to catch up on the baseball he missed. He would sometimes follow more than one game simultaneously, catching one on television while listening to another one on the radio. He recounted his childhood passion for baseball in another autobiographic novel, Vanity of Duluoz (1968). He followed the game until his passing, which came before he turned 50 due to his excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol. He was known to attend spring training games in Florida after making his home there in the late 1960s, and would show up uninvited at the local newspaper's offices to quickly bang out an article about the game.

The Lowell Spinners paid tribute to Kerouac by issuing a bobblehead depicting his time as sportswriter for the local paper. Another French-Canadian novelist, Georges Desmeules, puts him as a character in his baseball-themed novel, Le Projet Syracuse (2008) in the guise of writer Louis Giroux.

Further Reading

• Dan Cichalski: "Kerouac's lifelong love of baseball", mlb.com, March 11, 2022. [1]
• Jack Gewirtz: Kerouac At Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats, The New York Public Library, 2009. ISBN 978-0871044624
• Jim Reisler: "Jack Kerouac: The Beat of Fantasy Baseball", Baseball Research Journal, SABR, Vol. 28 (2008). [2]