Biography of : Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac, baptized a Roman Catholic as Jean Louis Kirouac, was born March   12 1922, at 9 Rupine Road, in Lowell, a small industrial town and textile weaving   centre in North-Eastern Massachusetts. He was the third child of Léo Alcide Kéroack and Gabrielle Ange Lévesque. His older brother Francis Gérard, born in 1916, passed away in 1926 and his sister Caroline was born in 1918.

Léo Alcide Kirouack, who later changed his name to Kéroack, was born in 1889 in Saint Hubert (Quebec) on Canadian land, while Gabrielle Ange Lévesque, by a twist of fate, was also born in Canada, precisely in Saint Pacôme, while her mother was traveling in Quebec during the Christmas Holidays. She had come from Nashua, New Hampshire, to visit her husband’s parents and had to extend her stay until February 1893. She then gave birth to twin daughters, one of which was to become Jack’s mother. The establishment of this branch of our family in the United States had been the fact of Léo Alcide’s father.  

It was around 1890, that Jean Baptiste Kirouack, Jack’s grand father and his wife Clémentine Bernier migrated to what in those days, seemed to thousands of Quebecois, as the only place that could offer them work and money to insure the survival of their family. It is a documented fact that close to half of the French Canadian population in Quebec migrated south to the US between 1850 and 1900. Jean Baptiste was of the very first waves of emigrants who left for the United States and could very well be one of the first descendants of our ancestor to settle there. He had left Saint Hubert de Rivière du Loup to go work as a carpenter in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Jack’s father, Léo Alcide, began his working life as an insurance agent before operating his own printing shop. After selling it, he went to work as a linotype operator in New Haven and later on, Brooklyn. He died in the spring of 1946 from a stomach cancer.

Jack completed his primary and secondary years of schooling in Lowell.  In 1939, he moved to New York and entered Horace Mann Preparatory School before registering at Columbia where he spent a first year in 1940-1941. It was at the fall of 1941, at the eve of his second year in Columbia, that he abandoned his University studies. 

It is at this very moment that his life as a writer begins. His wandering on American highways will turn him into one of the great writers of his generation.

Jack was married three times. At first he had married Frankie Edith (Edie) Parker, whom he will leave two months later. Then it was with Joan Harverty. This second marriage won’t last much longer than the first; they will break away six months later.

Janet Michelle (Jan), his daughter, was from this second marriage. Born February 1952, she followed her father’s footsteps and became a writer. She wrote two books: Baby Driver in 1981 and Trainsongs in 1988. In 1996, she died at 44, while working feverishly at her third novel titled Parrot Fever. Her early death prevented her from pursuing her court action in contest of her grand mother’s will that made Jack’s third wife, Stella Sampas, the unique heir to the Kerouac succession. At the beginning of 2006, the court action was still pending in Florida after an adjournment imposed in September of 2004. His third wife whom he married in 1966, Stella Sampas, was the sister of one of his best friends as a kid and who was later killed in Europe during World War II.

Jack Kerouac’s literary work is now studied in a multitude of colleges and universities all over the world. He has become a landmark to his generation and is now recognized as one of the greatest American writers of the XX^th century. He has been and still is a regular subject of books and articles in English; French; as well as many foreign languages.   

Jack Kerouac passed away at only 47, on October 21^st 1969 in Saint Petersburg Florida. His body was laid to rest in Edson Cemetery, Lowell, Massachusetts.

Op. jamb / 21.05.2006