Jack Kerouac

American Catholic History

Noelle & Tom Crowe

History, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Education

5 • 724 Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2024

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts to Catholic parents. When he was four his saintly elder brother, Gerard, died tragically. His mother became more devout, but his father abandoned the faith and drank heavily. This childhood trauma affected the rest of his life, and he stopped going to Mass in his teens. After dropping out of college he began to write while in the military. In the late 1940s he and his friends, through their artistic and literary output, began the Beat Generation, signifying how their generation felt “beaten down” by the world. In 1951, Kerouac wrote his most important work, On the Road, but it wasn’t published until 1957. But through it all, what he was looking for was God. In the 1960s he returned, in stages, to the Catholicism of his youth, fully returning to the faith by the end of the decade. He died in 1969 as a result of a lifetime of heavy drinking.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to American Catholic History, brought to you by the support of listeners like you.
0:11.0	If you like this podcast and would like to support our work, please visit American Catholic
0:16.0	History.org slash support. I'm Noelle Heister Crow. And I'm Tom Crow.
0:21.6	Today we're talking about Jack Carrowack.
0:24.5	Kerouac was the author of a number of books, most notably his 1957 magnum opus on the road.
0:31.0	Carowack is a complex character, to put it mildly.
0:34.0	He lived life hard, he tried everything he could try try and did it all in his search for God.
0:38.7	His life reminds me of the Hillbilly Toma song, Weight of Eternal Glory. I love that song.
0:43.3	And also Natalie Merchant. Well, yeah. Sorry, can never hear Kerouac without Natalie Merchant going through
0:48.5	my head. Yeah. Anyways, the weight of eternal glory is a great song. We really love it. It's about people living through hard times in
0:54.6	their lives, but despite the pain, they hang on to their hope in God. Which, yes, really is a succinct
0:59.7	way to put it vis-à-vis Jack Kerouac. He was a haunted soul who kept looking for God in all the wrong
1:04.7	places, even though he always knew exactly where to find him, and he ultimately did return.
1:09.6	And along the way, he turned his own angst
1:11.6	and searched for God into one of the most significant cultural movements of the 20th century.
1:16.7	Yeah, he was one of a core group of writers and artists who spawned the Beat Generation.
1:21.0	And later in life, a journalist asked him that if he really was a Christian, like he claimed,
1:25.0	why didn't he write about Jesus? Carrowack replied,
1:27.9	You're an insane phony. All I write about is Jesus. Which is a weird thing to think about when
1:33.9	you experience his subjects and his treatment of them. Heedanism and restlessness reign.
1:39.8	But he said his book, On the Road, was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the
1:43.8	country in search of God. And we found him. So there's a sense in which his approach is similar to Flannery
	...

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