Image: Jack Kerouac, 1956. (Wikimedia Commons.)

On this day in history, September 5, 1957, New York Times writer Gilbert Millstein reviews “On the Road,” the second novel (hardly anyone had read the first) by a 35-year-old Columbia dropout named Jack Kerouac. “Jack went to bed obscure,” Kerouac’s girlfriend told a journalist, “and woke up famous.”

“On the Road” is an autobiographical novel about Kerouac’s cross-country car trips between 1947 and 1950, both by himself and with his good friend Neal Cassady. Cassady–Dean Moriarty in the book–was an interesting character, a suave and handsome hustler, some-time car thief (or not-so-occasional: he maintained that he stole more than 500 cars while living as a youth in Denver), a wanna-be writer who went with Kerouac on a number of his journeys. (Cassady usually drove; after a childhood automobile accident, Kerouac disliked driving)

Legend has it that Kerouac wrote “On the Road” in just three weeks, typing it on a 120-foot scroll made from taped-together sheets of tracing paper. The scroll exists–in 2001, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts pro football franchise paid $2.4 million for it–but the process of writing the book was hardly as improvisational as it sounds. After typing that first draft, Kerouac spent six years revising his manuscript before it was published.

 “Just as, more than any other novel of the twenties, ‘The Sun Also Rises’ came to be regarded as the testament of the ‘Lost Generation,’” Millstein wrote in his Times review, “so it seems certain that ‘On the Road’ will come to be known as that of the ‘Beat Generation.’” Millstein’s prediction came true: Kerouac became one of the leading voices of that Cold War–era cohort of young people known as the Beats, disillusioned by the militarism, materialism, conformity, and emptiness they saw all around them.

Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts, on March 12, 1922. Kerouac’s parents, Leo and Gabrielle, were from Quebec, Canada; Kerouac learned to speak French at home before he learned English at school. Leo owned a print shop, Spotlight Print, in downtown Lowell, and Gabrielle, known to her children as Memere, was a homemaker.

Kerouac endured a childhood disaster in 1926 when his beloved older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at nine. Drowning in grief, the Kerouac family embraced their Catholic faith more deeply. Kerouac’s writing was full of vivid memories of attending church as a child.

Kerouac’s two favorite childhood pastimes were reading and sports. He devoured all the 10-cent fiction magazines available at the local stores and excelled at basketball, football, and track. Despite wanting to become a novelist, it was sports, not writing, that Kerouac saw as his way to a secure financial future. With the beginning of the Great Depression, the Kerouac family suffered financial difficulties, and Kerouac’s father turned to alcohol and gambling to cope. His mother worked at a local shoe factory to boost the family’s income. However, in 1936, the Merrimack River flooded and destroyed Leo’s print shop, sending him into a spiral of worsening alcoholism and condemning the family to poverty. Kerouac, who was a star running back on the Lowell High School football team by that time, saw football as his ticket to a college scholarship, which could allow him to obtain a well-paying job and save his family’s finances.

Upon graduating high school in 1939, Kerouac received a football scholarship to Columbia University. Still, at first, he was required to attend a year of preparatory school in the Bronx. So, at 17, Kerouac moved to New York City, where he was awed by life in the big city.

In 1940, Kerouac began his first year as a football player and student at Columbia University. However, he broke his leg in the first game and was put on the sidelines for the remainder of the season. Although his leg had healed, Kerouac’s coach declined to allow him to play the following year, and Kerouac quit the football team and dropped out of university. He would spend the next year working odd jobs and figuring out what to do for the rest of his life. After a few months of doing menial jobs, Kerouac decided to join the armed forces to fight in World War II. He enrolled in the U.S. Marines in 1943 but was honorably discharged after only ten days for what his medical report related were “strong schizoid trends.”

After his discharge from the Marines, Kerouac went back to New York City and fell in with a group of people that would eventually define a literary movement. He befriended Allen Ginsberg, a Columbia student, and William Burroughs, another college dropout and aspiring writer. Jointly, these three friends would become the trendsetters of the Beat Generation of writers.

While living in New York during the late 1940s, Kerouac wrote his first novel, Town and City, an extremely autobiographical story about the intersection of small-town family values and the excitement of city life. Although the novel was published in 1950 and was well-reviewed, it did not make him famous.

Despite maintaining a prolific pace of publishing and writing, Kerouac could never manage the fame he achieved after writing On the Road, and his life soon spiraled into a blur of drunkenness and drug addiction. He married Edie Parker in 1944, but they divorced after barely a few months. In 1950, Kerouac married Joan Haverty, who gave birth to his daughter, Jan Kerouac, but this marriage, too, ended in divorce after less than a year. Kerouac married Stella Sampas, who was also from Lowell, in 1966. He died from an abdominal hemorrhage on October 21, 1969, at 47, in St. Petersburg, Florida.

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