How to use this Page

Ahead of a trip, many of us gravitate toward books that depict the history and culture of our travel destination. But it can work the other way around, too. Sometimes a book provides such a powerful sense of place that we find ourselves longing to visit the area we read about. Some of us even [...]

I was never much of a traveler until I read Kerouac's classic. Soon after reading On the Road, I took my first solo road trip from St. Paul to San Diego. It wasn't long after that I was driving all around the states, and my travel itch did not go away. I eventually joined the [...]

Art Institute of Chicago, photo by Vicky Lorencen

When you’re stupborn, you’re stupid and stubborn. I know because that’s what I am. At least that’s what I surmise. The lab tests are inconclusive, but a decade of firsthand observation cannot be ignored.

After more than ten years of writing, revising, reading, work-shopping, conference-going, networking, critique-grouping, class-taking, submitting and querying, I am still without a book contract. A smarter, less bull-headed person would have given up by now.

And why not? No one is forcing me into this pursuit. It’s self-inflicted without question. Yet, here I am peering into the shiny, giddy-go-lucky face of a new year and I am trudging ahead. I am not buoyed by hope or spurred by optimism. In fact, I feel quite hopeless. But my chronic stupbornness will not permit me to retreat or resign.

How about you?

Are you stupborn too?

You are? Oh, bless your heart. You need a cookie and a nap. But first, I’ve culled these quotes to encourage you:

There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me. ~  Jane Austen

I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing, and that until then I’ll rush around this world I insist is holy and pull at everyone’s lapel and make them confess to me and to all. ~ Jack Kerouac

It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed. ~ Albert Einstein

Happy New Year, my dear, sweet, stupid, stubborn friends. (And yes, yes, certainly, warm wishes to my smart friends too.)

Let’s show 2015 what we’re made of!

The living quarters of authors have always held a weird fascination for me. There’s something strangely intimate about knowing where another writer works and lives, how they arrange the furniture, what artwork adorns the walls. So I was interested but a bit disheartened when the Tampa Bay Times posted a series of photos from the interior of Jack Kerouac’s final residence, a “nondescript bungalow” in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Kerouac was famously nomadic: His classic novel, On the Road, follows the adventures (and misadventures) of a thinly-veiled Kerouac stand-in named Sal Paradise (and a band of pseudonymous friends, including Dean Moriarty as Neal Cassady and Carlo Marx as Allen Ginsberg.) Over the course of 300-odd pages, Sal travels from New York to Denver; San Francisco, Selma, Bakersfield and Los Angeles, California; then back again through Arizona, Texas, Missouri, Indiana and Pennsylvania, finally arriving again in New York, where he narrowly missed a visit from Dean. You can follow the route exactly on this color-coded, annotated map.

Kerouac’s birthplace in Lowell, MA. Photo credit: Rus Bowden, 2010.

His family moved around in Lowell through Kerouac’s youth. In one house, which the author later called “sad Beaulieu,” Jack’s older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever when he was only nine years old. Jack, who was four, never forgot him, and later named his novel Visions of Gerard after the older brother he’d lost.

“Sad Beaulieu,” Kerouac’s childhood home in Lowell, MA. Photo credit: Rus Bowden, 2010.

When he was a bit older, Kerouac and his parents lived in an apartment over a corner drugstore. Here, he wrote The Town and the City, published in 1950 under John Kerouac, which was well reviewed but sold poorly. (The drugstore was later replaced with a flower shop, as shown below.)

The tiny apartment where Kerouac lived while writing The Town and the City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

At the very cusp of fame—in 1957, just after On the Road was purchased by Viking Press—Jack moved to Orlando, Florida, where he lived in a tiny cottage with his mother. It was here, at 1418 1/2 Clouser St., that Kerouac typed the manuscript that would later become The Dharma Bums.

The home in which Kerouac completed The Dharma Bums, located in College Park, Orlando, Florida. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The College Park house is now the focus of The Kerouac Project, which, with the help of the state of Florida and a foundation of local fans and celebrities, has renovated and opened the house to the public.

In his last years, Kerouac lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, with his third wife, Stella Sampas, and his mother.

Exterior: The home of Jack Kerouac and his third wife, Stella Sampas. Photo credit: Lara Cerri for Tampa Bay Times

It’s a sad story, the kind you don’t really want to hear: The King of the Beats was ill, lonesome and broke when he was last visited by press in 1969. He let the reporter in, but there were no shots of Kerouac taken that day: “You better not try to take my photo, or I’ll kick your a–,” he said. A few weeks later, he was dead at age 47.

Kerouac’s desk. Photo credit: Lara Cerri for Tampa Bay Times

The living room of 5169 10th Ave. N., the home of Jack Kerouac at his death in 1969. Photo credit: Lara Cerri for Tampa Bay Times

To help fund the repairs, volunteers are hosting fundraisers at local venues. For more information about the house, and for more photos, visit Tampa Bay Times.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

This post is the first in a series titled “Where Writers Write,” which explores the homes and hideouts of famous authors: living and dead, foreign and domestic. A new post will appear each week on There Are No Rules. Stay tuned!

If you have suggestions for authors to feature in this segment, please email them to us at [email protected] with “Where Writers Write” in the subject line. No attachments will be opened, so please include your suggestions or questions in the body of your email. ___________________________________________________________________________________________

Adrienne Crezo is the managing editor of Writer’s Digest magazine. She lives and writes in Ohio. Her work has been featured on MentalFloss.com, The Atlantic, Business Insider, The Week and many other print and web publications. You can follow her on Twitter at @a_crezo.

By David Sterritt

Jack Kerouac, the novelist and poet who gave the Beat Generation its name, died 43 years ago on 21 October 1969 at the age of 47. This Friday, the long-delayed movie version of Kerouac’s autobiographical novel about crisscrossing the United States with his hipster friend Neal Cassady in the 1940s, On the Road releases. When the novel was published in 1957, six years after he finished writing it, Kerouac dreamed up his own screen adaptation, hoping to play himself (called Sal Paradise in the novel) opposite Marlon Brando as Dean Moriarty, the Cassady character. He wrote to Brando but Brando didn’t write back, so the dream production remained a dream. Now that it’s reaching the screen with Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund as Sal and Dean, we can only guess what Kerouac would have made of it.

On the Road remains Kerouac’s most widely acclaimed novel, partly for its literary merits — boundless energy, quicksilver prose, an almost mystical view of the American landscape — and partly because of the legendary way he created it, typing it on a 120-foot scroll so he wouldn’t have to interrupt the flow of words by changing paper. Kerouac wrote many other works, including several novels, a great deal of poetry, two books about Buddhism, a compendium of his nightly dreams, and a play that inspired the 1959 movie Pull My Daisy, a mostly playful glance at the mercurial Beat lifestyle. But his most prolific period was limited to the 1950s, when he wrote nearly of his significant works.

Weighed down and ultimately defeated by alcoholism and depression, Kerouac produced little of note after 1960 except the novels Big Sur and Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46, published in 1962 and 1968 respectively. He felt badly misunderstood by the American public, and although he was right, he was also to blame. His footloose characters and propulsive writing style had convinced admirers and detractors alike that being Beat meant disdaining the ordinary social rules — which was true as far as it went, but far less important to Kerouac than the need to be both “beat” and “beatific,” meaning saintly in a literal sense. Appearing on William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative TV show a year before his death, Kerouac said he rejected the “mutiny” and “insurrection” that the Beats had come to connote; instead he favored “order, tenderness and piety.” By this time, however, the Beats had given way to the flower children as the American gadflies par excellence, and few were interested in the profoundly religious sensibility — oscillating between Catholicism and Buddhism but always deeply felt — of a once-blazing rebel now seen as a soggy old complainer.

Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund in On the Road. Photo © Gregory Smith. Source: ontheroad-themovie.com

Although the original Beats were a loosely knit crew, its key members were unquestionably Kerouac, fiercely committed to the spontaneous writing he pioneered; Allen Ginsberg, a modernist poet inspired by everything from 19th-century verse to late-night radio patter; and William S. Burroughs, a storyteller with a schizoid style and a hearty appetite for sex, drugs, and metaphysics. Their rebellious values have stayed in the social imagination ever since their early days as friends and fellow travelers, influencing the cyberpunks of the 2000s no less than the hippies of the 60s and the punks of the 70s.

Two ideas united them: a shared rejection of consumerism and regimentation, and a collective desire to purge their lives of spiritually deadening dross. Their rallying cry was a call for remaking consciousness on a deeply inward-looking basis — revitalizing society by revolutionizing thought, rather than the other way around, through cultivation of “the unspeakable visions of the individual,” in Kerouac’s unforgettable phrase. They had different ways of accomplishing this. Kerouac became a self-described “great rememberer redeeming life from darkness” in the many novels he wrote; Ginsberg invented a new variety of incantatory, almost shamanistic verse; Burroughs cut, folded, and shuffled his pages to bypass his ego and extract fresh, outlandish truths. The ultimate goal for them and their followers is what Kerouac called “eyeball kicks,” the jolts of cosmic energy that divide everyday diversions from visionary art.

The new movie version of On the Road was written by Jose Rivera and directed by the respected Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles, who deserves an Oscar for just getting the picture finished. A number of writers, including major ones like Russell Banks and Michael Herr, have tried and failed to complete satisfactory screenplays during the 33 years that producer Francis Ford Coppola has owned the adaptation rights. Rivera’s effort finally captured the tone that Coppola was looking for, and Salles allowed the actors to improvise at times, which is very much in the Beat spirit. Reviews were mixed when the picture premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival last spring, but its American distributors, IFC Films and Sundance Selects, have expressed their optimism by scheduling its theatrical debut for December 21st, a popular timeslot for films with award possibilities. Kerouac loved movies, and one hopes he would have smiled on this big-screen reincarnation of his profoundly personal tale.

David Sterritt is a film professor at Columbia University and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and professor emeritus at Long Island University. A noted critic, author, and scholar, he is chair of the National Society of Film Critics and chief book critic of Film Quarterly, and was for many years the film critic for The Christian Science Monitor. His books include The Beats: A Very Short Introduction, Mad to Be Saved: The Beats, the ’50s, and Film and Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility, and he serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Beat Studies. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Huffington Post, Journal of American History, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Beliefnet, Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other publications. Sterritt has appeared as a guest on CBS Morning News, Nightline, Charlie Rose, CNN Live Today, Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The O’Reilly Factor, among many other television and radio shows.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only film and television articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only VSI articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund in On the Road. Photo © Gregory Smith. Source: ontheroad-themovie.com. Used for the purposes of illustration.

The post Jack Kerouac: On and Off the Road appeared first on OUPblog.

A teaser trailer has been released for the film adaptation of Jack Kerouac‘s beloved book, On the Road. Much of the plot featured in this novel was derived from Kerouac’s true life road trip adventures.

We’ve embedded the trailer above–what do you think? The movie will hit theaters in New York City and Los Angeles on December 21st. A national release will follow in January 2013.

Filmmaker Walter Salles cast actors Tom Sturridge and Garrett Hedlund to play the lead characters. Other cast members include Twilight actress Kristen Stewart, Doubt actress Amy Adams, and Lord of the Rings actor Viggo Mortensen.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Neil Strauss‘ The Game, law enforcement guides and Tintin comics made the list among Quora users who have been discussing the question, “What are the most frequently shoplifted books?”

The poster who posed the question wrote, “Neil Strauss’ ‘The Game’ is kept behind the counter at my local Barnes & Noble because people frequently walk out the door with it, a salesperson told me. What else do stores stash back there?”

Quora user Tamara Troup wrote: “At our library some of the most frequently stolen books are the Law Enforcement Officers training manuals, the civil service exam prep books, and the ASVAB prep books.” Quora user Alice York wrote: “At the two  public high school libraries where I have worked: A Child Called It by David Pelzer (a book about parental abuse) and The Rose That Grew From Concrete poetry by Tupac Shakur.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

While the release date for the much-hyped film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s beat generation masterpiece On the Road remains ambiguous at best, our interest here at Overlook is keen. We’ve been known to publish a few 60s inspired novels ourselves, including the recently released Any Day Now from San Francisco sweetheart Terry Bisson. But our Suze to Kerouac’s Dylan is the aptly named, Off the Road

Every week, I spelunk into the Writer’s Digest archives to find the wisest, funniest, or downright strangest moments from our 92 years of publication.

Today: A vintage article and quotes from Jack Kerouac (On the Road), who in January 1962 wrote a piece for WD asking, Are Writers Made or Born? (This week would have marked Kerouac’s 90th birthday. And, if you’re an On the Road fan, a new trailer is out for the upcoming film.)

I’ll include a smattering of highlights from the article below.

The question is always a matter of debate among writers, and Kerouac makes some (unsurprisingly) bold statements. What do you think: Are writers born or made?

Happy Friday!

“There can be no major writer without original genius. Artists of genius, like Jackson Pollock, have painted things that have never been seen before.”

“Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through—originality.”

“Five thousand university-trained writers could put their hand to a day in June in Dublin in 1904, or one night’s dreams, and never do with it what Joyce did with it: He was simply born to do it. On the other hand, if the five thousand ‘trained’ writers, plus Joyce, all put their hands to a Reader’s Digest-type article about ‘Vacation Hints’ or ‘Homemaker’s Tips,’ even then I think Joyce would stand out because of his inborn originality of language insight.”

“Anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just ‘talents.’ Hemingway later invented his own form also. The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely when a writer of genius amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar.”

“Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.”

“Oftentimes an originator of new language forms is called ‘pretentious’ by jealous talents. But it ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”

 

For more quotes and wisdoms from other legendary scribes, read our 90-year retrospective here.

WD is also having a giant warehouse sale through March 18. Check out the discounts on books, magazines and other products here.

Millennials are growing up in a time of uncertainty. They aren’t sure when (or if) they’ll find a job after high school or college, how they’ll pay their bills, or where they’ll be in five years. Looking to the future is scary, so instead,... Read the rest of this post

The great publisher Barney Rosset has passed away. Rosset bought Grove Press in the 1950s, championing the work of countless writers, including: Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Jack Kerouac, Malcolm X, Pablo Neruda, Kenzaburo Oe, Kathy Acker, and David Mamet.

In the 1960s, he launched the provocative magazine, Evergreen Review. In a highly recommended interview at The Paris Review, Rosset shared his first encounter with Miller’s work as a college freshman at Swarthmore:

I read Tropic of Cancer, which I bought at Steloff’s Gotham Book Mart on Forty-seventh Street. Who told me about it, I don’t know, but I liked it enormously and I wrote my freshman English paper about both it and The Air Conditioned Nightmare … After I read Tropic of Cancer, I left—decided to go to Mexico. Because the book had influenced me so much, I left in the middle of the term. But I ran out of money. I never got to Mexico; I got as far as Florida and I came back. Four weeks had gone by. They had reported me missing to the United States government. My family didn’t know where I was. I came back, sort of sadly.

(Via Sarah Weinman)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Need a good beach towel? In a new Photoshop contest, you can win one from The Paris Review.

To enter the contest, use Photoshop or other image editing software to show your favorite writer with The Paris Review‘s new beach towel. Contributing editor Sadie Stein shared the image embedded above, showing Peter Orlovsky, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs using the towel.

Follow this link to grab a copy of the beach towel image. Here are more details about the contest: “To enter, join our Flickr group and submit your image to the pool. We’ll share the winning image, along with a couple of our favorites on The Daily by the end of this month.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural born thief,” wrote Jack Kerouac, who, alongside St. Augustine and Mark Twain, features in Rachel Shteir’s The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting.

Kirsty McHugh

By the time that you read this, fair readers, I will be on my way home to Glasgow for the weekend to see my mum. I’m very excited. However, for those of you stuck at your desks, allow me to entertain you with some of my favourite recent blog posts and articles.

Sad news for the BBC Radio 4 listeners amongst us: Norman Painter, who has been the voice of Phil Archer since The Archers began in 1950, has died at the age of 85.

How important is similar taste in books in a relationship?

According to recent research, literacy  changes the structure of the brain.

Maurice Sendak tells parents worried by Where the Wild Things Are to ‘go to hell’.

A dog from Shropshire has been named the world’s oldest. Atta boy Otto!

The battle for Jack Kerouac’s estate.

Philip Stone of The Bookseller on books by celebrities.

Queen Victoria’s celebrity hippo.

A vexed owl. The second-last photo is my favourite.

An article celebrating 50 years of Asterix.

New in paperback this month is Off the Road, Carolyn Cassady's memoir of the now legendary Neal Cassady and his remarkable friendships with Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsburg. Written by the woman who loved them all - as wife of Cassady, lover of Kerouac, and friend of Ginsburg - this riveting autobiography captures one of the most vital eras in twentieth-century literature and culture. Cassady's portrait of love, literature, and friendship at the heart of the Beat Generation "bursts with emotions of joy and enlightenment, anger and restlessness, delight and desolation," according to the Boston Herald.