Kerouac, an author of himself

There is no better portrayal than the one a man makes of himself: “He got the best grade in English with Mark Van Doren, at Columbia (course on Shakespeare).

Flunked Chemistry… College football, baseball, and chess player… Married?

No way.

Occupations and personal jobs: Everything.

The list goes: boat boy, gas station attendant, deckhand, sports writer (

), train brakeman, screenwriter for

in New York, stupid clerk... baggage handler at a train station, collector of cotton, loader in removals... forest ranger in 1956, mason...", it is a fragment of the

that the American writer Jack Kerouac wrote at the request of his publisher to introduce the anthology of travel texts entitled

(McGraw Hill, 1960).

Kerouac (Massachusetts, 1922 - Florida, 1969),

of a self-styled “Beat” generation, did not skimp on the possibility of becoming a myth.

It began with the banal, its origin: more than once he assured that his surname survived the legacy of Baron François Louis Alexandre Lebris de Kerouac, for then yes, building the paths of

for those who would roll, in many ways.

forms and through various languages, the next generations of young people and artists around the globe.

Why wait for someone to talk about him? the author asked himself in front of a blank sheet of paper.

Kerouac makes obvious with his work that every legend must be written by the person involved, the protagonist.

Only this one will know what stays, what goes, what is invented.

Among so many anecdotes, the most attractive continues to be the one that testifies to the writing of the bible of the 'Beat Generation', the novel

(Viking Press, 1957).

A monumental book written in record time, without the luxury of rest.

Dostoyevsky, although not his magnum opus, achieved it with

.

Of course: unlike the Russian, Kerouac did not rush his cause out of economic necessity —not to mention a death threat—, but rather to “not lose track of ideas”, suggest some biographical texts that refer to the fact.

tradition

will know that

it was written in a matter of 21 days;

that the spontaneous prose and its fluidity are rooted in the story that the author joined sheets with glue to obtain a roll of paper, a tube of canvas with which to be able to literally paint his adventures, those that attest to the trips made by the highways of the United States and Mexico, in company or alone, during 1947 and 1950. The purpose of said reel was to let consciousness roll.

There are few great novels that carry great stories of their constitution;

authors who manage to become characters.

In the first press mention of

, published on September 5, 1957 by the New York Times under the title "Books of The Times," critic Gilbert Millstein puts it this way: "This book requires exegesis and background detail.

Neo-academics and avant-garde “official” critics may be condescending… and elsewhere superficially treated as merely “absorbing” or “picaresque”… But the fact is that

it is the most beautifully executed expression, the clearest and the most important made so far by the generation that Kerouac himself named “beat” years ago, and whose main avatar is him”.

The doubts that could exist around these stories —that of

, that of its author or that of a generation for which, in the words of one of its members, John Clellon Holmes,

live is much more crucial than the

— they are precisely the ones that arouse the desire to admit them.

In the end, it is what a reader or aspiring writer wants.

A myth.

A model.

Kerouac, who has been so romanticized, is still not obsolete.

Like few others, he managed to print in his work the idea of ​​movement, beyond an anecdote or a pretext, as the essential axis of life;

of the importance of an instant due to its ephemeral nature.

Kerouac will be remembered for the spontaneous pulse in his writing, for his jazzy improvisation with pen and paper.

Because of the promiscuity of his narrations;

for promoting Buddhism, drug use and sexual freedom.

For being, probably unintentionally, an ideologue of libertarian movements in the second half of the last century.

But above all for having become a myth next to his work.

In Campbellian logic, Kerouac felt the call and he just followed it.