An outstanding athlete, he received a football scholarship to Columbia University, but withdrew from the university during the fall of his sophomore year. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1943 and was honorably discharged after six months as an “indifferent character.” Kerouac worked for the remainder of World War II as a merchant seaman and later began associating with the bohemian crowd around Columbia, which included Ginsberg and Burroughs, both of whom were influential in Kerouac’s intellectual and artistic coming of age as well as becoming major figures associated with the Beat movement. Like Ginsberg and Burroughs, many of Kerouac’s friends among the Beats served as the basis for the characters in his novels. Poet Gary Snyder, for instance, inspired Japhy Ryder, the main character in
The Dharma Bums (1958). The single most influential personality in Kerouac’s circle of friends, and the protagonist in both
On the Road and
Visions of Cody (1972), was Neal Cassady. Kerouac saw the energetic, charismatic Cassady as the quintessential Beat figure—an independent spirit who lived unhindered by societal conventions. Kerouac also cited Cassady’s stream-of-consciousness writing style, exemplified in his voluminous correspondence, as having inspired his own “spontaneous prose” technique.
This is a free page. This page contains 194 words. This
article contains 63,483 words (approx. 212 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Jack Kerouac Access Pass.
