Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, better known as Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), the son of French-Canadians spiced with the blood of Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians and subdued, no doubt, by migration from Quebec to Lowell, an old mill town in Massachusetts, eventually fulfilled his adolescent ambition
to live the life of the eccentric ‘artist’ . . . a high form of aesthete who has nothing to do with this maddening world of Philistines.
He hoped that ‘lingual spontaneity’ would enable him to achieve ‘Supreme Reality’.
In fact, On the Road (1957) did indeed serve as a guide to all America for the Beat Generation of the Fifties and after. His closest boyhood friends, who called themselves the Prometheans, aspired to bestow the
fire of hip enlightenment on the whole‘brotherhood of mankind’. Kerouac went beyond his Jesuit high-school education and a brief stay at Columbia university on a football scholarship to explore the free-wheeling spirituality of his own version of Buddhism.
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