45 Fun Facts About Jack Kerouac

In which Massachusetts mill town was Jack Kerouac born in 1922?

Lowell drew him back late in life: he moved home with his third wife, Stella Sampas, and his invalid mother, and was buried there in 1969.

Kerouac's family spoke which language at home during his childhood?

French, in a Canadian dialect: he learned English at school around age six and kept a marked accent into his late teens.

Kerouac considered suing over which 1960s TV series he felt had copied On the Road?

Route 66: Kerouac felt ripped off by its two roaming heroes, but he was talked out of taking the case to court.

Kerouac's older brother Gerard, later the subject of Visions of Gerard, died of what at the age of nine?

Rheumatic fever killed Gerard in 1926, and four-year-old Jack later said his brother followed him through life as a guardian angel.

Kerouac won a scholarship to Columbia University for his talent in which sport?

Football: the scholarship first sent him to New York's Horace Mann School, where a friend introduced him to jazz.

What ended Kerouac's first season on the Columbia team?

He broke a leg as a freshman, then feuded with coach Lou Little, who benched him, and he soon dropped out of Columbia.

In 1943 Kerouac was discharged from the Navy Reserve with what diagnosis?

Schizoid personality was the final diagnosis; he said he had only asked for aspirin for headaches and was first labelled with dementia praecox.

Kerouac wrote his first novel, unpublished until 2011, while serving as what in 1942?

A Merchant Mariner on the SS Dorchester, which a submarine sank months after he left, killing several of his former shipmates.

In 1944 Kerouac was arrested as a material witness after his friend Lucien Carr killed whom?

David Kammerer: afterwards Kerouac helped Carr get rid of the knife and some of the dead man's belongings.

Under what first name was Kerouac credited on his first published novel, The Town and the City?

John was the byline; the book earned a few respectable reviews but was a commercial failure.

What did Kerouac tape together to make the original On the Road scroll?

Sheets of tracing paper, cut to fit his typewriter; the popular story that the scroll was a roll of teletype paper is wrong.

How long did Kerouac take to type the scroll draft of On the Road in April 1951?

About three weeks, though Kerouac had planned much of the book in his journals over several years beforehand.

Which friend, the model for Dean Moriarty, did most of the driving on the trips behind On the Road?

Neal Cassady drove because Kerouac had no licence; he learned to drive only at 34 and never had a formal one.

Kerouac narrated which 1959 short film starring poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso?

Pull My Daisy used part of his only play, Beat Generation, which producers turned down and which lay forgotten in a warehouse until 2005.

Which publisher finally brought out On the Road in 1957 after years of rejection?

Viking Press demanded major revisions: sexually explicit passages were cut and real names swapped for pseudonyms.

Which newspaper's 1957 review hailed On the Road as 'the most important utterance'?

The New York Times ran Gilbert Millstein's rave, and the book made Kerouac famous almost overnight.

In On the Road, the character Old Bull Lee, visited in Algiers, Louisiana, is based on which writer?

William S. Burroughs co-wrote a novel with Kerouac, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, about the 1944 killing that got them both arrested.

Kerouac wrote the introduction to which photographer's 1959 book The Americans?

Robert Frank's book first came out in France in 1958 with texts by other writers facing the photos; the 1959 US edition dropped them for Kerouac's introduction.

Where does Sal fall ill with dysentery and get abandoned by Dean near the end of On the Road?

Mexico City, where Dean leaves Sal delirious with dysentery to get back to his marriages; Sal later comes to understand why.

Who bought the original On the Road scroll at auction in 2001 for $2.43 million?

Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, let the scroll tour museums and libraries.

Which director produced the 2012 film of On the Road?

Francis Ford Coppola had bought the film rights more than three decades earlier, then spent years failing to get it made.

Who directed the 2012 film of On the Road, which competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes?

Walter Salles shot parts of this American road story abroad, in Montreal and in Argentina and Chile.

Who played Dean Moriarty in the 2012 film of On the Road?

Garrett Hedlund got the part Kerouac had once pitched to Marlon Brando, who never answered his 1957 letter.

Kerouac credited which Times Square hustler with first using the word 'beat' in conversation with him?

Herbert Huncke meant broke and beaten down, but Kerouac later tied the word to beatitude, a state of blessedness.

Rejecting the 'beatnik' label in 1969, what did Kerouac tell a reporter he was instead?

A Catholic: he then showed the reporter a painting of Pope Paul VI and said, 'You know who painted that? Me.'

Kerouac's The Dharma Bums centres on his friendship with which poet, fictionalised as Japhy Ryder?

Gary Snyder took Kerouac mountaineering, and his stories of fire-spotting helped inspire Kerouac to take a lookout job himself.

Kerouac spent summer 1956 as a fire lookout on which mountain in Washington's North Cascades?

Desolation Peak left him desperately lonely, and that summer became material for Desolation Angels and the close of The Dharma Bums.

Kerouac's 1962 novel Big Sur is set at a cabin in Bixby Canyon owned by which Beat poet?

Lawrence Ferlinghetti owned the cabin, where Kerouac retreated to escape the sudden fame that On the Road had brought him.

Which indie singer made an album of songs from Kerouac's Big Sur with Jay Farrar?

Ben Gibbard: the 2009 album One Fast Move or I'm Gone grew out of songs the pair wrote for a documentary about the book.

What did Kerouac call his writing method, influenced by bebop jazz and Buddhist breathing?

Spontaneous prose dropped full stops for long dashes marking breaths, as a jazz musician breathes between phrases.

Which Ginsberg poem was inspired by Kerouac's free-flowing prose method?

Ginsberg was initially unimpressed by the method but became one of its great champions.

Kerouac's only child, Jan, was born in 1952 to which of his wives?

Joan Haverty: Kerouac denied being the father and fought child support, first meeting Jan at about ten when he took a blood test.

Kerouac used his On the Road earnings to buy a home in which Long Island town, living there with his mother?

They moved into a wood-framed Victorian on Gilbert Street in March 1958 and moved house twice more in the town.

Kerouac read from On the Road and Visions of Cody on whose television show in November 1959?

Steve Allen also accompanied Kerouac on piano for their 1959 album Poetry for the Beat Generation.

Kerouac's last television appearance, in 1968, was on which conservative's programme Firing Line?

The same year he split with Ginsberg over the anti-war movement, which he thought was just an excuse to be 'spiteful'.

Kerouac died in October 1969 in which Florida city?

He was 47; the cause was an oesophageal haemorrhage brought on by cirrhosis from years of heavy drinking.

Which world named a crater after Kerouac in 2015?

Mercury names its craters after artists, musicians and authors recognised as significant for more than 50 years.

Who inherited most of Kerouac's estate?

His mother Gabrielle: Kerouac had promised his dying father he would take care of her.

Which keyboardist wrote that without On the Road, 'The Doors would never have existed'?

Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Patti Smith, Tom Waits and the Grateful Dead have all cited Kerouac's influence.

Which band's 1987 album In My Tribe includes the song 'Hey Jack Kerouac'?

The Beastie Boys name-checked him two years later on Paul's Boutique.

The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was founded in 1974 at which Boulder institution?

Naropa's founder, Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa, asked Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman to start its poetics department, which they named after Kerouac.

A 1958 photograph of Kerouac was used in which clothing brand's 1993 'Who Wore Khakis' campaign?

Gap traded on Kerouac's countercultural cachet, lending ordinary khakis an air of freedom.

The model for Dean Moriarty died in 1968 after collapsing beside a railway track near which Mexican town?

San Miguel de Allende: after a wedding party he set off along the railway to walk to the next town, and was found collapsed beside the tracks.

In the 1960s the man behind Dean Moriarty drove the bus Furthur for which author's Merry Pranksters?

Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters crossed America in Furthur in 1964, a trip Tom Wolfe chronicled in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

The 1980 film Heart Beat, about Kerouac's love triangle with a married couple, cast which actor as Kerouac?

John Heard played Kerouac in the drama, which was adapted from the wife's memoir and drew only mixed reviews.