The Bay Area never provided Jack Kerouac with a real home. But it played a major part in his life, as it did in the lives of his fellow Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the latter of whom founded City Lights Bookstore in 1953.
Jack Kerouac in 1956, a year before “On the Road” was published. Jack Kerouac never took a creative writing class and never taught one either, but he compiled what he called “a List of Essentials” that has helped novelists, poets and non-fiction writers for decades.
On March 12 at the Beat Museum in North Beach, co-founder Jerry Cimino, who has greeted Kerouac fans from around the world for nearly two decades, will unveil plans for a new home for the treasures he has gathered over a lifetime. Kerouac is an odd and unusual character and a real American legend, often misunderstood as “The King of the Beats.” Largely self-taught and often a loner, he cast himself as an outsider who liked nothing better than to sit at a typewriter and get creative.
Kerouac began his literary career by copying the lifestyle of his adventurous hero, Jack London, the author of a memoir titled “The Road,” and by imitating the prose of Thomas Wolfe, the author of “Look Homeward Angel” who died at 37. Almost all of his friends, including Snyder, Ginsberg and Cassady, plus his three wives, appear as fictional characters in his novels. Were they to be published today, the author would probably be sued for libel and invasion of privacy. At 91, Gary Synder is the only living member of the original circle of Beat writers that also included San Francisco’s Philip Lamantia. Initially, Snyder didn’t like the way he appeared in print. But he grew to live with his portrait.