Who is Jack Kerouac?

By Reda Tipton

Jack Kerouac was a writer with vision; he inhaled his countrymen's dreams into his soul and exhaled the love of his country in his writing.  Brilliant, with a photographic memory, he wrote constantly about real people and real events.  He exploded into the nation's consciousness in 1957 with the publication of On the Road.  Like a mirror held up to Eisenhower's America, the book reflected not Ozzy & Harriet but hobo camps and juke joints across the continent.  The novel was a torch ablaze against the dreary Cold War landscape, and the Beat Generation had found its voice.

Jean-Louis Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents. Brought up in a mystical form of Catholicism, and deeply spiritual by nature, his life's quest included religious exploration. In the mid-1950s, while attending college, he and his best friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg, began to study Buddhism.  Much of his work reflects the journey towards enlightenment.