Strange Dream Card

American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969) was one of the most charismatic and influential voices in post-war American literature. Born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac to a working-class French Canadian family in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac began writing while serving in the Merchant Marine in WWII. Living in New York City before and after the war, Kerouac met many of the seminal influences in his life, including William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsberg, and Herbert Huncke. It was during a conversation with Huncke that Kerouac coined the term “Beat Generation,” riffing on a slang term meaning, basically, down and out, without much hope for the future. Kerouac is best known for his second novel, On the Road. A roman à clef (like most of his novels) it recounts his epic, drug-fueled road trips with Neal Cassady and other friends the late 1940s and early 50s. The novel had difficulty finding a publisher, due to the manic writing style, the drug use, and the sexual (especially homosexual) content. When On the Road was finally published in 1957, Kerouac became an instant celebrity and the voice of a generation— or at least of the seekers, and the rebels. Kerouac was also a hero to the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, though he found the hippies a bit too radical for his taste. For most of his life, Kerouac was a devout Catholic. However, he also delved deeply into Buddhism, influenced by his friend Gary Snyder, subject of his 1958 novel Dharma Bums.