Friday, March 12, 2010

Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!

| The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor: "It's the birthday of Jack Kerouac, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the author of On the Road (1957), a book that brought him instant fame and labels like 'King of the Beats' and 'the voice of a generation.' Writers Ken Kesey, Haruki Murakami, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, and Tom Robbins have all pointed to Kerouac as a defining influence on their writing. And songwriter Bob Dylan said about On the Road: 'It changed my life like it changed everyone else's.'"

2 comments:

Todd Mason said...

I'll take the mildly self-promoting opportunity to mention my post with the link to Kerouac's film, written and narrated by (with David Amram's score), PULL MY DAISY, at http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/search?q=pull+my+daisy
or hit the hotlink on my name.

Dan said...

I had the happy experience of re-reading ON THE ROAD last year while on a slow-moving train from Prescott to the Grand Canyon as a bad troubador sang old cowboy songs. Kerouac's prose somehow made everything more vivid.