KEROUAC KRONOLOGY by Attila Gyenis

The following are significant events (and some not so significant) in Jack's life.

(written on what would have been Jack's 75th Birthday)

Age 0 - Born March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts Jean Louis Kerouac.

Age 4 - His older brother Gerard, age nine, dies of rheumatic fever.

Age 16 - Meets Mary Carney, who later ends up as Maggie Cassidy, published in 1959... Playing for the Lowell High School football team, scores the winning touchdown against Lawrence High School. The football coach from Columbia University is at the game and eventually recruits Kerouac to Columbia.

Age 17 - Graduates High School... Attends Horace Mann Prep School in New York at the suggestion of the Columbia football coach... Partakes in his first stick of Tea... Publishes several articles in the Horace Mann Record, the school newspaper.

"The moment we opened the heavy set door, a rush of warm musty air bearing the strains of some amazing jazz greeted us. The architecture of the place was definitely Saxon, with latticed walls and iron-set doors, in addition to earthenware vases dotting the various shelves which lined the brown colored walls." (Horace Mann Record, December 8, 1939)

Age 18 - Attends Columbia University on a football scholarship but breaks his leg early in the season sidelining his career as the great American football player.

Age 19 - U.S. enters WWII.

Age 20 - Signs up with the merchant marines and sails out on the S.S. DORCHESTER. He sails to Greenland. The ship is sunk by the Germans on a subsequent trip.

Age 22 Meets Ginsberg and Burroughs for the first time. Meets Huncke and together with the rest of the group, would be later known as the founding fathers of the Beat Generation... Is jailed as a material witness to a murder. Marries Edie Parker, in part because it was the only way to get the bail money so he could get out of jail.

Age 24 - His father, Leo Kerouac, dies in their family home in Ozone Park, NY... Starts writing his first novel, The Town and the City... Meets Neal Cassady.

Age 25 - Takes his first cross country trip which would later appear in On The Road.

Age 26 - First road trip with Neal Cassady. Neal appears at Rocky Mount, North Carolina on Christmas Eve, with his wife LuAnne Henderson and Al Hinckle. They had just driven cross country in a 1949 Hudson. Their first ride would be a trip from Rocky Mount to Ozone Park, NY. A few weeks later they would take off on their first cross country adventure to California, stopping off in Algiers, Louisiana, to hook up with Burroughs.

Age 27 His first novel, The Town and the City, is published.

Age 28 - Marries Joan Haverty, after having his marriage to Edie Parker annulled.

Age 29 - Jan Kerouac, his daughter with Joan Haverty, is born. It would take Jack until 1962 before he would officially acknowledge Jan as his daughter.

Jack reading. Age 33 - An excerpt from his then unpublished book On The Road is published under the pseudonym Jean Louis. This was done in an attempt to avoid paying child support for his daughter Jan... The 6 Gallery in San Francisco has the famous reading where Allen Ginsberg reads Howl for the first time.

Age 34 - Spends the summer working as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the state of Washington. Instead of finding quiet time and meditation, he finds boredom.

Age 35 - On The Road published. In a review in the New York Times, Gilbert Millstein writes:

"On The Road is the second novel by Jack Kerouac, and its publication is a historic occasion in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion (multiplied a millionfold by the speed and pound of communications)."

Age 39 - Meets his daughter Jan for the first time. He was taken to court by Joan Haverty for child support payments. Jack is forced to take a blood test to prove paternity. She wins the court case and Jack is forced to pay $52 a month.

Age 41 - The Beatles invade America.

Age 44 - Marries Stella Sampas who is the sister of one of his childhood friends.

Age 45 - Vanity of Duluoz is published, which will be Kerouac’s last novel published during his lifetime... Meets his daughter for the second and last time.

Age 46 - Neal Cassady dies.

Age 47 Man lands on the moon... Kerouac dies in a St. Petersburg, Florida, hospital on October 21, 1969. He is buried in Lowell, MA.

PROLOGUE

What is the Kerouac legacy? His legacy is evident everyday. It is why we are reading this right now. It would not be an understatement to say that Kerouac is one of the major influences on the creative/art world today. One of the last things he ever wrote was After Me, The Deluge. I don’t know how many khakis Jack helped sell, but the number of people who are now writing, reading, creating and discussing because of him are countless. It would also be fair to say that Kerouac is getting his due. The deluge is upon us.

Jack, Happy Birthday.

The Day Jack Kerouac was born (according to Jack)

IT WAS IN CENTRALVILLE I was born, in Pawtucketville saw Doctor Sax. Across the wide basin to the hill--on Lupine Road, March 1922, at five o’clock in the afternoon of a red-all-over suppertime, as drowsily beers were tapped on Moody and Lakeview saloons and the river rushed with her cargoes of ice over reddened slick rocks, and on the shore the reeds swayed among mattresses and cast-off boots of Time, and lazily pieces of snow dropped plunk from bagging branches of black thorny oily pine in their thaw, and beneath the wet snows of the hillside receiving the sun’s lost rays the melts of winter mixed with roars of Merrimac was born. Bloody rooftop. Strange deed. All eyes I came hearing the river’s red; I remember that afternoon, I perceived it through beads hanging in a door and through lace curtains and glass of a universal sad lost redness of mortal damnation ... the snow was melting. The snake coiled in the hill not my heart.

Young Doctor Simpson who later became tragic tall and grayhaired and unloved, snapping his--"I think everything she is going to be alright, Angy," he said to my mother who’d given birth to her first two, Gerard and Catherine, in a hospital.

"Tank you Doctor Simpson, he’s fat like a tub of butter--mon ti n’ange..." Golden birds hovered over her and me as she hugged me to her breast; angels and cherubs made a dance, and floated from the ceiling with upsidedown assholes and thick folds of fat, and there was a mist of butterflies, birds, moths and brownesses hanging dull and stupid over pouting births.

Jack Kerouac, Doctor Sax

The above information is correct to the best of the author's knowledge. Please forward any corrections to kerouaczin@aol.com