Jack Kerouac - In 1939 he graduated from high school, smoked marijuana for the first time, and paid money to lose his virginity.

... His imagination fueled by Ginsberg and Burroughs - and two other new companions, marijuana and benzedrine - Kerouac began writing his first novel. He typed like the athlete he still was: one hundred words a minute in marathon all-night sessions


Jack Kerouac is typically remembered as the author of On the Road, the quintessential Beat Generation novel. Like most of Kerouac's work, it was autobiographical, drawn from his own life experience and given rhythm and color by the personalities and adventures he'd experienced along the way. Unlike in his first novel, The Town and the City, (in which Kerouac had invented elaborate characters and plots, only loosely inspired by real life events), when he finally sat down to create the published version of On The Road, Kerouac decided to thoroughly immerse the reader in the real events and characters he'd experienced exploring the highways and alleys of America with pal Neal Cassady. This concept of simply putting the grit of real life down as fiction was one he borrowed from writer friend John Clellon Holmes. But the style of On the Road was pure Jack -- or depending on how you look at it, pure Neal Cassady. For it was the careening, confessional, jazz-like prose of letters received from Cassady that Jack adapted for writing On the Road.

zaterdag, 09 december 2000 | 2868 Hit(s) | (1 vote) | Read more...