This week (March 6-12) in literary history – Pearl Buck
died (March 6, 1973); Louisa May Alcott died (March 6, 1888); Elizabeth Barrett
Browning was born (March 6, 1806); Ayn Rand died (March 6, 1982); Gabriel
Garcia Marquez was born (March 6, 1928); Robert Frost published the poem “Stopping
By Woods on a Snowy Evening (March 7, 1923); Thomas Wolfe published Of Time and the River (March 8, 1935);
Virginia Woolf delivered manuscript to first novel The Voyage Out to her publisher (March 9, 1913); Ernest Hemingway
divorced Hadley Richardson (March 10, 1927); Mary Shelley published Frankenstein (March 11, 1818); Erle
Stanley Gardner died (March 11, 1970); Jack Kerouac was born (March 12, 1922)
Highlighted Story
of the Week -
On March 12, 1922, novelist and poet Jack Kerouac was born
in Lowell, Massachusetts. Kerouac was the son of French-Canadian parents and
learned English as a second language. In high school, Kerouac was a star
football player and won a scholarship to Columbia University. His athletic career
was cut short by a severe leg injury. During World War II, he served in the
Navy but was expelled for severe personality problems that may have been
symptoms of mental illness. He then became a merchant seaman. In the late
1940s, he wandered the western U.S. and Mexico and wrote his first novel, The Town and the City. It was not until
1957, when he published On the Road,
an autobiographical tale of his wanderings, that he became famous as a seminal
figure of the Beat Generation. His tale of a subculture of poets, folk singers,
and eccentrics who smoked marijuana and rejected conformist society was written
in just three weeks. The book is filled with other Beat figures, including
Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Kerouac wrote five more books but none
gained the mythic status of On the Road.
A heavy drinker his entire life, he died on October 21, 1969 in St. Petersburg,
Florida, age 47 from a hemorrhage caused from cirrhosis of the liver and was
buried at Edson Cemetery in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Check back every
Friday for a new installment of “This Week in Literary History.”
Michael Thomas Barry is the author of six nonfiction
books that include Literary Legends of
the British Isles and America’s
Literary Legends. Visit Michael’s website www.michaelthomasbarry.com for
more information. His books can be purchased from Amazon through the following
links:
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