As Frank Wilson, my friend and former editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, notes on his blog, BooksInq, Jack Kerouac was born on this date in 1922. (He died in 1969 at age 47).
Frank Wilson (seen in the below photo) linked to his 2007 Inquirer piece on Jack Kerouac:
Jack Kerouac was born on this date 99 years ago. Here is a piece I wrote
to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road:
OK,
so here I am, sitting in front of a computer, 50 years after the fact of the
matter - which is the publication, on Sept. 5, 1957, of Jack Kerouac's On the
Road
- and I'm thinking to myself, wow, if Emerson was right,
and "to be great is to be misunderstood," Jack's got to be as great
as anybody, because he sure is misunderstood, especially by those who think
they got him down cold, as demonstrated by all this hoopla lately about his
most famous novel, even though it's not his best.
Jack - that's how you thought of him if you were a
working-class kid like me a few weeks shy of my 16th birthday, attending a
parochial high school and given to literary pipe dreams, because he looked like
one of us, wearing jeans and flannel shirts, and called himself Jack, not John,
which wasn't like the other authors we'd heard about (the No. 1 novel that
year, By Love Possessed, was by a guy with the buttoned-down three-pieced
name of James Gould Cozzens) - Jack, as I was saying, may have crashed and
burned in the too-soon end, never getting to wear those "forlorn rags of
growing old" he so very much dreaded, but neither did he stay put as Sal
Paradise, freeze-framed in a timeless moment
No,
Jack and his friends did what they said they were going to at the end of On
the Road: They drove to the Metropolitan Opera and saw Duke Ellington. Then
Jack transmogrified himself into Ray Smith, dharma bum - righteous bum, if you
please - and climbed a mountain with Japhy Ryder, poet, scholar, woodsman and
would-be sage, and thanks to Road Novels 1957-1960 (Library of
America, $35), which gathers five of Jack's novels and selections from his
journals into one volume, you can follow along and find out what happened
after, as Jack puts it in one of those journal entries, he "escaped Neal's
compulsive mystique de haschhisch."
You can
read the rest of the piece via the below link:
Jack Kerouac's sound of America (inquirer.com)
You can also watch Jack Kerouac on William Buckley's Firing Line via the below link:
Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The Hippies - YouTube
And you can visit Frank Wilson's blog at https://booksinq.blogspot.com.
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