Happy Hump Day, dear reader.  Today is a rather significant day on the Dead Poets Society calendar, so let’s get to it.  Today is Jack Kerouac Day!

Ever heard of Jack Kerouac and/or the Beat Generation?  How about On the Road?  Ever get shit-housed on a bottle of cheap Port and try to write a book by the time that rotten sun comes up?  I certainly have.  But you’re a No?  Well, shit.  I guess I’m no longer surprised by such things, but I shall include you in my nightly prayers nonetheless.

On March 12, 1922, Jack Kerouac burst onto the scene in Lowell, Massachusetts.  The Beat Generation’s wild child, he wrote On the Road in a three-week amphetamine-fueled spree, hammering it out on a single scroll of paper.  [I’ve recently wondered about how Kerouac would have viewed the endless digital paper now available to all writers.  My guess is he’d be thrilled.]  It’s a raw, kinetic hymn to freedom – hitchhiking, jazz, and living fast – capturing the restless spirit of post-war America.  Kerouac was not another mincing desk-bound scribe; he lived the chaos he wrote, drinking hard and rambling with icons like Neal Cassady.  His spontaneous prose kicked the door down for a new kind of literature, making him a rebel king whose influence still roars.  He turned the road into a revolution.

Kerouac’s influence on the Beat Generation was seismic – he was its pulse, its voice, its restless soul.  He crystallized a post-war counterculture that rejected the tidy, consumerist 1950s American Dream for something rawer, freer, and messier.  The Beats were poets, writers, and wanderers (Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady – who craved authenticity over suburbia, and Kerouac was their reluctant poster boy.

The Beat Generation – coined from “beaten down” or “beatific,” depending on who you ask – was about shaking of the shackles of convention.  Kerouac gave it legs with On the Road (1957), a semi-autobiographical novel tracking his cross-country treks with Cassady (recase as the wild Dean Moriarty).  It’s less a story, more a vibe: jazz riffs, cheap diners, and the open highway as a middle finger to the 9-5 grind.  He tapped into a post-WWII restlessness – vets, dreamers, and misfits who felt the world was too big to stay put.  His mantra of “spontaneous prose” – writing without revision, like a jazz-solo – became the Beat calling card, urging writers to let it rip, unfiltered.

Kerouac’s style was his rebellion.  He hated the polished, academic prose of the time, so he wrote how he talked – fast, loose, and alive.   As mentioned supra, he famously banged out On the Road on a 120-foot scroll of taped-together paper, single-spaced, over three Benzedrine-fueled weeks in 1951 (though he’d been sketching it for years).  Lines like “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved” hit like a drumbeat – urgent, unapologetic.  He pulled from jazz giants like Charlie Parker, aiming for that same improvisational flow.  On the Road was a manifesto for living without a net.  His other works – like The Dharma Bums (1958), with its Zen-tinged mountain rambles, or Big Sur (1962), a darker dive into his unraveling – kept the Beat fire burning.  They showed the flip side: the spiritual hunger, the burnout, the cost of freedom.  Ginsberg called him the “King of the Beats,” and you see it in how his voice bled into Howl (1956) or Burroughs cut-up chaos in Naked Lunch (1959).

Kerouac’s influence wasn’t just on the page – it was how he lived  He hitchhiked with Cassady, crashed in San Francisco’s North Beach, and drank with poets in Greenwich Village.  His French-Canadian roots and Catholic guilt gave his work a haunted depth, but he chased the now – booze, Buddhism, and all-night rants.  Cassady was his muse, their letters and road trips were Beat gospel.  Kerouac’s refusal to settle down – until fame and alcohol wore him out – mirrored the characters he wrote, making him a walking symbol of the movement’s highs and lows.

The Beats didn’t stay small.  Kerouac’s work lit a fuse for the 1960s counterculture – hippies, Dylan’s lyrics, even Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo style.  On the Road sold millions, turning gas stations into pilgrimage stops for kids craving escape.  Critics sneered, as they do – Truman Capote thought it was “typing, not writing” – but I think he missed the point: Kerouac made literature feel dangerous again.  He influenced everyone from Tom Waits to Patti Smith, who called him a “wilderness saint.”

Kerouac didn’t wear the crown easily.  By the late ’50s, he was a reluctant celebrity, hounded by fans and mocked by squares.  He drank harder, retreated to Lowell, and died at 47 in 1969 from a liver wrecked by years of excess.  The Beat flame he lit burned him out – but it never dimmed his mark.

Happy birthday, Uncle Jack!

N.P.: “October in the Railroad Earth (with Steve Allen) – Jack Kerouac