He sat on his mother’s couch, smoking marijuana and watching the McCarthy hearings, cheering Tail Gunner Joe. He was 32 and it was 1954. In his 20s and the 1940s, he said he’d like to join his Russian comrades and fight against Fascism.

He coined the term “Beat Generation” which became the proto-countercultural movement of the 1960s. He detested the 1960s counterculture, noting that the Beatnik’s was a movement of enthusiasm and glee, not one of disgruntled whining.

He took Benzedrine, morphine, marijuana, hashish, LSD, and opium. He saw a statue of Mary turn its head.

He died at age 47 from hemorrhaging of the esophagus, the drunkard’s classic death. His corpse held a rosary and his funeral Mass was held at St. Jean Baptiste Catholic Church.

Such was the short life of Jack Kerouac.

He was hip before it was hip, crisscrossing America in the late 1940s, from New York to Denver to San Francisco, with stops in Des Moines, Chicago, New Orleans, and points in-between, with a jaunt into Mexico City.

He wrote about it during a Benzedrine-fueled three-week writing session in 1951, typing onto rolls of paper that were taped together into a long scroll so he didn’t have to stop to change the paper. When Truman Capote heard that Kerouac had written the book in three weeks, he sneered, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

But youngsters disagreed. They lapped up the book when it was published in 1957 and took to the road, seeking to become Beats.

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