Poet, writer, singer of the restlessness of at least two generations. Had he still been alive he would have turned one hundred years old (March 12). But it’s almost impossible to think that Jack Kerouac would have liked to live that long. Because “contradiction” is the noun that best described it. And because only things that have value end early.
Yet, Kerouac was one of the most important writers of contemporary America and, above all, one of the founding fathers – like Ginsberg and Burroughs – of beat generationthe cultural movement born in New York in the mid-1940s and which will find its places of choice in San Francisco and Paris.
His most famous work, the very famous
Contradictions
Contradictions, in fact. Like that of someone who tells the journey as a metaphor for life, but he does not have a license: the most authoritative of the beatniks did not know how to drive. In short, there were two Jacks. The first rejected social conventions, sought freedom, rebelled against morality (through art and the use of alcohol and drugs). The other was a practicing Catholic, pro-Vietnam war and for whom beat meant blessed.
Jazz poet
Kerouac, who described himself as a jazz poet (he was influenced by Charlie Parker and Count Basie), wrote his works using a roll of teletype paper “so as not to alter” – he said – “the flow of thoughts”. That “spontaneous prose” will become his X factor and will bring the rhythm of his writing closer to that of the bebop style. Loved by readers, hated by critics, Ti-Jean – as he was called as a child – is considered the forerunner of the hippy movement, even if he will reject any association with the pacifist groups of the sixties.