Jack Kerouac -- Happy 90th Birthday -- From Boston Daily (March 8, 2012)

by Matthew Reed Baker



    New Englanders have long revered sober, canonical writers likeAlcott, Hawthorne, Frost, Thoreau, and Updike. Which may be why we’ve tended toignore Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation icon and poet, and let SanFrancisco and New York claim him as their own. Though Kerouac was born in theblue-collar Lowell neighborhood of Centralville, today one of the onlyremembrances of him in that city is the small and modest Kerouac Park, whichsits two blocks off the main drag, Merrimack Street. Kerouac would have turned90 this month, so as a posthumous birthday present, it’s time we put him in thepantheon of our region’s great authors.


    Why isn’t he therealready? Maybe it’s because we like our writing pristine to the point of prim.Kerouac’s was messy, decadent, and urbane, and he wrote about messed-up,indulgent people — or “fornicators and masturbators,” as a Lowell housewifeonce complained to his face. But the main reason is that most of us know onlyone of his novels, On theRoad, which ignored New England. Instead, it described road tripsacross the U.S. during the late 1940s, as Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise,sought a new way to live that was wild, free, and poetic. On the Road made Kerouac a worldwide pop-culture figure. It was translatedinto dozens of languages, and has inspired generations of free thinkers eversince.

   Famous as it is, On the Road represents just a fragment ofKerouac’s career. His real life’s work was a series of autobiographical novels— more than a dozen in total — collectively titled The Duluoz Legend. Writing about New England, Kerouac is less the dissolute poetof fame than a simple man reflecting on his insecure youth. He chronicles thedeath of his nine-year-old brother from rheumatic fever; the 1936 flood thatdevastated the Merrimack River Valley; high school football games and trackmeets; and carousing in Scollay Square, Boston’s old red-light district. Thesememories from the 1930s and 1940s inform the books about his later days, whenhe’d moved far away. They speak more about modern New England life thanThoreau’s ruminations at Walden Pond. Kerouac’s work also establishes him asthe region’s foremost French-Canadian writer, detailing the life of a communitylong overshadowed by Italians, Irish, and WASPy Brahmins.


     Lowell is honoring Kerouac's birthday with a weekend of events, but let's expand that celebration statewide.  We're declaring March Jack Kerouac Month:  Pick up a copy of The Town and the City — his first novel, covering life inMassachusetts — grab a bottle of wine, and dig in.


See also: (March 8-11,  Lowellcelebrateskerouac.org).