Kerouac

The Life of Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. Jack, as he was later called, spoke no English until he was around six years old. At home, his family spoke a "colored" French language called Quйbйcois French. Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac, Jack's parents, were both descendants of French-Canadian immigrants who settled in New England. Life in Lowell during Jack's childhood was not easy. While it had once been an important industrial town, businesses were on the decline and the Great Depression hit Lowell's economy hard. Many families, including the Kerouacs, had trouble making ends meet. Gabrielle worked in factories off and on throughout Jack's lifetime. Jack's father worked as a newspaper reporter, eventually owning his own printing business until a devastating flood hit Lowell and he was forced to sell it. After this failure, Jack's father turned to gambling and never regained financial success.

Leo and Gabrielle had two children older than Jack: Gerard, born in 1917 and Caroline (nicknamed Nin), born in 1920. Gerard's health was fragile due to a heart condition. After months of suffering in 1926, Gerard succumbed to a rheumatic fever at only nine years old. Jack had loved and idolized his older brother, and at only four years old, could not understand Gerard's death. It had a continual impact on Jack's imagination and thoughts, and perhaps caused adults to perceive Jack as a quiet, brooding child.

From a very early age, Jack was very creative and artistic. He drew cartoon scripts and acted his own "silent movies" in the family's parlor. Later in his childhood, Jack began to create his own magazines, in which he drew the pictures and wrote the texts. Although he was quiet, he had many friends and companions as a child. He was educated in French-speaking Catholic parochial schools until he reached junior high, when he began his first experience learning entirely in English at the public schools in Lowell. Once Jack learned English, he began to read everything he could get his hands on, from conventional novels to pulp mysteries.

In high school, Jack became a local football star. He was so talented as a halfback, in fact, that he won a scholarship to play for a college education at Columbia. Before entering the university, the scholarship provided that Jack take a year at Horace Mann, an academy in the Bronx, which enabled him to take some math and French classes before beginning college. Jack went to Columbia in 1940 to begin playing football, but broke his leg early in the season and was benched. After a disagreement with his coach the next fall, Jack quit football and Columbia and hit the road back to Lowell.

Jack landed a job as the sports reporter for the Lowell Sun, where he worked for several months. He decided that sports writing in Lowell was not for him, and moved briefly to Washington, D.C.