NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
Near the end of his life, Jack Kerouac said, “I don’t want to be known as a beat poet anymore; I want to be known as a Catholic.”
Since his death in 1969, however, the author of On the Road has been memorialized as many things—-the father of the “Beat Generation,” the grandfather of hipsterdom, a drunk, a libertine, and even a Buddhist—-but rarely as a Catholic.
Born on March 12, 1922, Kerouac was the son of two French–Canadian Catholics living in Lowell, Massachusetts. Although his father eventually fell away from the Church, his mother’s devotion remained strong. From her, Kerouac learned to see the world as a place of grace, touched everywhere by God. He continued to see it that way his whole life, although he stopped going to Mass when he was 14, and not long afterward embarked on a journey across America that was marked primarily by moral dissolution. But according to Kerouac, even in the dissolution, he looked for grace.
As he said of the book that memorialized that trip, “[On the Road] was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God.”
With a personal diary tattooed on nearly every page by a sketch of a crucifix or a scribbled prayer for mercy, Kerouac was, in some sense, Christ–haunted. He knew that, and he was surprised when others didn’t know it as well. When one reporter had the temerity to ask him why he never wrote about Jesus, he replied, “I’ve never written about Jesus? You are an insane phony. All I ever write about is Jesus.”
A lifetime of heavy drinking led to Kerouac’s early death in 1969 at the age of 47. He did, however, receive a Mass of Christian burial in his boyhood parish, remembered as a Catholic, at least in death, by the Church of his youth.
