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.
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).
