"Francis FordCoppola 'The Road' by Jack Kerouac

 Jack Kerouac was born March 12, 1922 in Lowell (Massachusetts), within a Catholic family of French-Canadian working class. From an early age developed a close relationship with his mother psychological dependence. Smart, shy and observant, he excelled in sports. A football scholarship allowed him to enter Columbia University.

Without ever renouncing their Catholic beliefs, Kerouac, during his college years, curious about Buddhism, which later would serve to give some of his novels their distinctive Oriental flavor. However, he told his friend, fellow faculty and poet Gary Snyder: "I do not give a shit and mythology and all the names and aspects of Buddhism, I just want the first of the four Buddhist truths: the Life is suffering. "

A knee injury prevented him from continuing his career. Driven by his roving nature, he joined the Merchant Navy. While on board, read everything he could lay his hands: Hemingway, London, Thomas Wolfe and, especially, Henry Miller. In America full of happiness that you had just won World War II, Kerouac, unsatisfied, it sought any and every time he touched ground, drank and wrote compulsively.

Also launched a promiscuous sex life with women, perhaps to hide himself, and his occasional tendency of homosexual behavior. He settled in New York where he met Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady, the core of the Beat Generation. Between 1947 and 1950 across the United States several times with Cassady, and in 1951 wrote the play that would make him world famous: On the road, a long interior monologue written a short prose, direct and syncopated overflowing youth, friendship, travel, love and the occasional excess.

Beat Generation

For the rest of his life, Kerouac is a walking contradiction: drifter who depended closely on her mother, a devout Catholic and libertine, bohemian and eccentric rabid reactionary father and perpetual adolescent, three failed marriages and a daughter he barely knew - man-without seeking introvert who became a prophet-generational.
The character was already defined. Is this the arch vault that explains all his life, a bipolar personality that will progressively misaligned final self-destruction? Seeing as it's over, died of cirrhosis of the 47 age-, it appears so. However, the writer himself, conscious of his inner demons, but also angry with the clichés that media criticism and fans threw on his work, he rebelled against this interpretation.

For Kerouac, the hallmarks of the Beat Generation-existential quest, trespass to the conventional tracking, new interior and exterior roads, the signs of a messy but sincere religious concern.

This was stated in 1957: "The beat phenomenon expresses something deeper: the desire to leave, out of this world is not our kingdom-upward in ecstasy, saved, like the visions of saints cloistered Clairvaux Chartres and resurfaced as the grass on the sidewalks of civilization tired and sore after his recent exploits ... I have not heard mention of God, the Last Things, the soul, to-where-we-going between the guys in my generation. "

A year before his death, a drunken Kerouac as Cuba, already devastated by alcohol, say the same thing again, but more crudely, on the television program Bill Buckley: "Many criminals and communists got into my car and changed who originally had the idea of \u200b\u200bthe beat generation as a generation of bliss and sweetness to transform it into rebellion and insurrection, words that I, as a Catholic, never used. "

Perhaps this religious quest culminated never explain the fascination that still occurs among the many readers of his most famous novels, adventures and revelry which are accompanied by echoes of transcendence.

José Barros
Inter Economia...

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