Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

To the children and the innocent it's all the same.

And in keeping with Japhy's habit of always getting down on one knee and delivering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the Sierra, and the others in Marin, and the little prayer of gratitude he had delivered to Sean's shack the day he sailed away, as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said "Thank you, shack." Then I added "Blah," with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Alien Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. He quit school in his sophomore year after a dispute with his football coach and joined the Merchant Marine, beginning the restless wanderings that were to continue for the greater part of his life. His first novel, /The Town and the City, /appeared in 1950, but it was /On the Road, /first published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as "the Beat generation" and made Kerouac one of the most controversial and best-known writers of his time. Publication of his many other books followed, among them /The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, /and /Big Sur. /Kerouac considered them all to be part of /The Duluoz Legend. /"In my old age," he wrote, "I intend to collect all my work and reinsert my pantheon of uniform names, leave the long shelf full of books there, and die happy." He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.