Big Sur
(Jack Kerouac)

Jack Kerouac was born March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. Jack was raised Catholic by his parents and he often spoke of his religious affiliations in his works. Kerouac was a talented football player in high school, which earned him scholarships to many prestigious universities, though Columbia is the one he chose to attend. Shortly into his college football career Kerouac was injured and told that he could not play anymore; following this news Kerouac dropped out of college completely. After leaving academia behind him, Kerouac spent a lot of time on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where he made friends who would become main characters in his works. These friends were known as key figures of the Beat Generation and were mostly artists, poets, and writers.

Kerouac was known for writing about his experiences as a Beatnik in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the emotional turmoil he faced in the 1960s. Perhaps his most well-known and celebrated work, On the Road (1951) chronicled Jack’s cross-country trips with his closest beatnik friends. Big Sur (1962) was written by Kerouac ten years later, and it follows Kerouac’s mental deterioration at the prospect of dealing with life as a middle-aged alcoholic who is no longer the happy and attractive twentysomething he was when he wrote On the Road. Kerouac penned many books and poems throughout his lifetime, all involving his life during the Beat Generation and his philosophies on existence; and all including the same roster of characters though they are always given different names. Kerouac died October 21, 1969 of internal bleeding caused by complications of alcoholism.