Jack Kerouac’s On the Road made him one of America’s most famous authors, but behind the scenes, that fame destroyed the lives of the people closest to him. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in March 1922 to French Canadian parents, Kerouac didn’t speak English until he was six. That wasn’t the only way his early life shaped him. At just four years old, tragedy struck when his older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever.
The loss split the family in two. His father Leo lost his faith and turned to vices, while his mother Gabrielle clung even harder to her Catholic religion. Caught between a broken father and an unshakable mother, young Jack found his lifeline in her, later describing her as the only woman he ever truly loved. He made his first confession at age six and claimed that it was then he heard the voice of God warning him that he would suffer greatly in life before finally finding peace.
It didn’t take long for that suffering to begin, starting with a war that was rapidly approaching. When World War II finally reached American shores at the end of 1941, Kerouac was nearing his twentieth birthday. Like many of his able-bodied peers, he found himself serving in the military within a few months. But although he was part of both the Merchant Marines and the U.
S. Navy Reserve, Kerouac’s service never took him beyond American soil. Even at home, though, he managed to get into trouble. He joined the Navy Reserve in 1943, but his time there was brief.
Kerouac served only nine days of active duty before a strange chain of events unfolded. He ended up on the sick list, claiming it all started with a complaint of a headache. But something deeper seemed to be happening beneath the surface. For Kerouac, it felt like he simply complained of a headache, asked for aspirin, and suddenly found himself in the medical ward, diagnosed with a host of complicated-sounding conditions.
Further medical examination suggested that Kerouac was adjusting poorly to his new life in the army. He was quoted as saying, “I just can’t stand it. I like to be myself. So, what’s the truth?
What was Jack Kerouac actually suffering from, if anything? ”
Based on the report, the examining doctors diagnosed him with a collection of vague and outdated terms such as dementia, schizophrenia, indifferent personality, and schizoid personality. These days, modern specialists associate many of those terms with someone on the autism spectrum. Of course, it’s impossible to diagnose Kerouac now, but his symptoms were enough to end his service.
And that’s where things started to get interesting. Kerouac briefly attended Columbia University, following up on his high school football success. But his athletic career eventually ended when his true passion for poetry and writing took over. When that was done, Kerouac left Columbia but stayed in New York.
During this time, he began building relationships with famous names that would stay with him his entire life. While at Columbia and on the Upper West Side of New York, Kerouac formed bonds with several men and women who would become part of the famous Beat Generation he was later associated with. Among them were his then-girlfriend Edie Parker and journalist Lucien Carr, who introduced him to his old friend William Burroughs. These three would become key players in one of the most dramatic periods of Kerouac’s life.
That story actually began long before Kerouac ever met Carr. Carr grew up in St. Louis, where he first met David Kammerer. Kammerer met Carr through a Boy Scout troop that Carr had joined and Kammerer led.
Despite the age difference of nearly fourteen years between them, making Kammerer a man and Carr a boy, Kammerer was said to have become obsessed with Carr, desiring him in a way no man should. That single moment unknowingly pushed Kerouac onto a path he never expected. History has blurred the exact details of the Carr and Kammerer relationship. No one can say for certain what did or didn’t happen between them, whether Kammerer’s advances were unwanted or if they framed Carr.
What is known is that after that period, Carr began moving rapidly from school to school, from place to place. No matter where Carr went, though, Kammerer never strayed far behind him. That brings us to New York in 1944. There, Kerouac, Carr, Burroughs, and their friend Allen Ginsberg spent their time wandering and engaging in the kind of behavior only young men confident in their freedom and immortality can pull off.
Kammerer supposedly hovered at the edges of the group, making Kerouac and the others uncomfortable, though Carr might have tolerated him at times. That situation might have continued unchanged if Kerouac and Carr hadn’t gotten an idea. They decided that New York no longer offered them any amusement. Instead, they sought passage on a merchant ship bound for the then-occupied Paris, pretending to be a Frenchman and his deaf-mute friend, hoping to arrive in time for the Allies to liberate the city.
This allegedly panicked Kammerer, who dreaded the thought of losing Carr in a place he couldn’t follow. He could only hope the crazy plan would fail. Then the boys found a ship. On August 13, 1944, Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr boarded a vessel determined to make their ridiculous dream come true.
Things seemed within reach until the ship’s steward kicked them off at the last minute. Suddenly, with a free night on their hands, Kerouac and Carr found themselves drinking at their usual spot. Kerouac left before Carr and ran into David Kammerer on his way out. He never realized the extent of the damage he caused when he told Kammerer where Carr was, now alone.
What happened next turned into a strange case of conflicting accounts, except one side was no longer able to speak for himself. According to Carr’s version, which the authorities accepted, Kammerer made another unwanted advance. When Carr rejected him, Kammerer flew into a rage and attacked the younger, smaller man. Carr claimed Kammerer overpowered him until Carr remembered something.
In a bitter irony, given how their relationship had begun, Carr stabbed Kammerer with a scout knife he carried with him. It was, by that account, self-defense. But Carr appeared panicked, weighting the body with rocks and disposing of it in the Hudson River. At this point, for Kerouac, the incident had nothing to do with him except his worry for his friend.
But then Carr went a step further. That night, Carr wandered the city, dragging one friend after another into the mess he had made. He visited Burroughs first, handing him Kammerer’s blood-stained cigarettes to dispose of. Although Burroughs repeatedly urged Carr to get a lawyer and turn himself in, Carr ignored him.
Instead, he made one final stop before surrendering, ensuring that no matter what happened, he would drag Kerouac down with him. Before giving himself up, Carr showed up on Kerouac’s doorstep, handing him the blade that had wounded Kammerer, which Kerouac helped dispose of. He probably only thought about helping his friend and didn’t see the consequences waiting for him. But once Carr followed Burroughs’ advice and turned himself in, Kerouac found himself answering another knock at the door.
This knock carried far graver consequences. Following the incident, Jack Kerouac found himself under arrest as a material witness in Lucien Carr’s crime, as was Burroughs. While Burroughs easily made bail, Kerouac had a problem. Without enough money, he turned to his parents for help in getting out of his current predicament.
But if he expected sympathy and support from them, Kerouac was mistaken. His father refused to pay his bail. Without that money, Kerouac remained stuck. He likely never expected that helping a friend could land him in this mess.
He seemed to have nowhere left to turn and would remain detained until the entire proceedings were over. That was until someone else came forward with a plan to free him. Edie Parker thought she could help, but her help came with a harsh condition. Through her parents, Parker could provide the necessary funds to get Kerouac out of custody.
But that money came with one condition. Kerouac and Parker had to get married. On August 22, 1944, a little over a week after the original incident between Carr and Kammerer, Kerouac married Edie Parker in the presence of investigators at the municipal building. Afterward, the investigators locked Kerouac back up.
He spent his wedding night in the Bronx city jail. But once the marriage was official, his wife’s family paid his bail, and Kerouac returned with his new wife to Michigan, where he lived with Parker, her mother, and her younger sister. While Kerouac and Parker seemed to think their spontaneous marriage merely accelerated what they had always planned to do, married life didn’t live up to expectations. Kerouac and Parker’s marriage was short-lived.
Within two months, Kerouac realized that domestic life in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, with his new wife and her family didn’t suit him. He returned to New York, leaving Parker behind with her family. Two years later, Parker successfully petitioned to have their marriage annulled. While Kerouac’s marriage proved fleeting, that fateful night in New York that had brought them together lingered in memory.
Kerouac’s marriage didn’t last, but what Carr had done to Kammerer seemed to haunt everyone involved in the incident. Less than a year later, Kerouac and Burroughs got together to process what had happened in the only way they knew how. They co-wrote the novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a novel with alternating viewpoints written by each author. But the novel likely proved to be more than the two young writers could handle.
Although Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs became prestigious authors, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks remained hidden long after both men had passed away. The Carr incident partially appeared in Kerouac’s later novels. But before Kerouac could show his ideas to the world, he first had to find his own path. Freed from jail and from Parker, Kerouac was unbound and searching for something new to anchor him.
He and his parents settled in Queens, where he began working on his writing again. He published his first novel, The Town and the City, in 1950, but struggled to gain recognition for his work. A handful of promising reviews wasn’t enough to promote the book and drive sales. Around the same time, Kerouac had a chance encounter that would change the course of his life forever.
Jack Kerouac and Joan Haverty met in Manhattan, and there seemed to be an immediate attraction between them. Shortly after meeting, Kerouac invited Haverty to his home in Queens to meet the most important person in his life, his mother Gabrielle. The meeting seemed positive, as only two weeks later, Kerouac found himself in another sudden marriage. Although his second marriage lasted longer than the first, it wasn’t successful by any measure.
In some ways, it was worse. While Kerouac and Haverty’s marriage ultimately ended controversially, their early days together seemed to inspire him greatly. During his marriage to Haverty, Kerouac completed the first draft of the novel that would bring him fame beyond anything he imagined. After cutting tracing paper into strips and pasting them together, Kerouac supposedly spent three weeks writing until he came up with something no one had ever seen before.
After roughly three weeks, Kerouac had a manuscript for an essentially autobiographical story following two young men, Kerouac and Neal Cassady, traveling across America and Mexico. Although Kerouac wrote it in a burst of inspiration, he faced a problem. The work was long and unpublishable in its current form. It had no chapters and was full of bold, expressive language.
No one wanted to publish it. Unable to publish the novel he had written, Kerouac set it aside and turned to other writing projects and a series of odd jobs to make ends meet. As if that weren’t enough of a problem, his personal life began to fall apart too. Once again, he realized something about marriage only after getting tangled up in it.
Though Kerouac had initially found inspiration in his marriage to Haverty, even writing her into his massive manuscript, the romance began to fade gradually. As with Parker before, Kerouac quickly found that marital bliss didn’t suit him. Eight months into the marriage, his second marriage collapsed. But this time, he was the one left behind.
In the spring of 1951, around the time Kerouac finished his masterpiece, Haverty decided that life with an eccentric artist wasn’t as wonderful as she had initially thought. She left, but she wasn’t alone. When Haverty left Kerouac, she was carrying his child. Seven months later, she gave birth to a daughter she named Jan Kerouac.
However, some had doubts about her right to that name. Jack Kerouac refused to acknowledge his daughter as his child. When Joan Haverty gave birth to their child and attributed her to him, Kerouac questioned the validity of that claim. When Haverty demanded child support, Kerouac sued her and fought the matter in court.
The only way he would support the child his ex-wife claimed was his daughter was if the courts proved he was the biological father. In the end, Kerouac turned out to be wrong. About nine years after the birth, Kerouac finally got biological proof that Jan was his daughter. Throughout that entire time, Kerouac had avoided his daughter.
But once conclusive evidence of his paternity was presented to him, he finally did the decent thing and met the girl. However, anyone looking for a happy ending to this story would be disappointed. Jack Kerouac only met his daughter twice in his entire life. The first time was when the blood test proved she was indeed his daughter, and the second was when she visited him at his home.
By the time he sorted things out, the damage was already done. No warm relationship ever developed between father and daughter. Instead, Kerouac had another child to care for, one that seemed more important to him than his own flesh and blood. Kerouac’s true child was the manuscript he had finished all those years before.
It carried many titles, but when Viking Press published it in 1957 after many grueling revisions, it was known as On the Road. Although Kerouac wrote many novels, poems, and short stories throughout his career, none affected his life and the world the way On the Road did. On the Road changed Kerouac’s life. It achieved immediate success, shining a spotlight not just on him but on his entire circle of Beatnik friends.
Since his early days in New York, Jack Kerouac surrounded himself with like-minded people. Other writers like William Burroughs and the infamous Lucien Carr. While they all made names for themselves, On the Road catapulted Kerouac to a level the others could only dream of reaching, and he hated it. After On the Road, Kerouac became known as the King of the Beat Generation, a term he deeply resented.
Though Kerouac spent most of his time with his fellow Beat writers, he didn’t believe in the counterculture that quickly surrounded the Beat movement. Deep down, Kerouac remained completely conservative and traditional in his values and beliefs. As he told one journalist, “I’m not a beatnik. I’m a Catholic.
” But the argument over his identity or authenticity became the least of Kerouac’s problems. Within nine months of publishing On the Road, Kerouac’s entire life changed. He became afraid to go out in public for fear of his safety, and rightly so. One night, outside one of his favorite spots, the San Remo Cafe in New York, three men attacked him and left him badly injured.
To make matters worse, his personal life wasn’t the only thing that On the Road seemed to have disrupted. When Jack Kerouac finally published On the Road, he changed the names of the real people who inspired his characters, mainly to avoid lawsuits. But most people seemed to know exactly who many of those characters were meant to be. Neal Cassady became Dean, a character who took up a large portion of the novel.
When authorities arrested Cassady for selling marijuana, many believed his newfound fame from On the Road contributed to the incident. Kerouac continued writing and participating in activities throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. But by the mid-1960s, his life began to crumble. His sister died suddenly in 1964, and two years later, his beloved mother Gabrielle suffered a serious stroke that left her with mobility problems.
Around that time, he also married a childhood friend, and many critics questioned the timing of that engagement. Jack Kerouac had known Stella Sampas since he was a young boy. She was the sister of one of his childhood friends. Kerouac needed help caring for his mother, and Sampas proved to be the perfect solution to that problem.
Misfortunes continued to pile up for Kerouac. It’s impossible to know what thoughts ran through his mind when nausea hit him on the morning of October 20. But panic surely seized him as he leaned over the toilet and began vomiting blood. He was rushed to the hospital, but the damage was already done.
Kerouac inherited his faith from his mother, but he inherited his drinking habit from his father. After years of excessive consumption, Kerouac’s body finally gave out. He suffered from esophageal bleeding, and his liver was so damaged it could no longer clot blood. Despite undergoing surgery, he never regained consciousness and died the following morning.
He left behind a long literary legacy. But now the question arose as to what would become of that legacy. Jack Kerouac left almost everything to his mother. However, Gabrielle’s health was no better than her son’s.
When she died a few years later, she left everything to the woman who cared for her, Kerouac’s late wife, Stella Sampas. And here, Kerouac’s daughter suddenly reappeared in the picture. Jan Kerouac claimed someone had forged her grandmother’s will and took the matter to court. Unfortunately, she died before the case reached any resolution.
But Kerouac’s nephew continued the fight, claiming his uncle told him he never wanted his wife or the hundreds of members of her family to have his works. After decades of litigation, the courts ruled that Gabrielle Kerouac’s will was likely forged, but no further action was taken. Most of Kerouac’s works had already been sold by then, and to this day, the Sampas family still controls the rights to them.