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| Panther Books UK, 1982 |
So I watch Maggie watch Tommy — out of the corner of my eye. Tonight she's more beautiful than ever, she has a little white rose or flower of some kind in her hair, to the left, her hair comes down on both sides of her brow almost over the corners of her eyes, her lips pursed (chewing gum) to watch and doubt. She has a lace collar, very neat, she went to church that afternoon and to Mrs O'Garra down Chelmsford Road to get that cakemix for the party. She has a crucifix on her dress breast; lace ends on her short sleeves; little bracelets on both wrists; hands crossed, sweet white fingers I eye with immortal longing to hold in mine and have to wait — fingers I know well, cold slightly, moving, nudging a little as she laughs but primly stay folded in her hands — her legs crossed show sweet knees, no stockings, the well-formed calf below, the hint of snowy legs, the little dress pathetically draping off this ladylike arrangement of herself. Her hair hangs, black and heavy, soft, smooth, curly, to her back — the white flesh and the sullen unbelieving river eyes more beautiful than the eyes of all the sun-eyed blondes of MGM, Scandinavia and the western world— The milk of the brow, the pear of the face, the solid silky proud erect neck of the young girl— I take her all in for the hundredth time that night.
The Novel: Maggie Cassidy is something of an anomaly in the Kerouac oeuvre — a novel, according to the writer's first biographer Ann Charters, that follows 'a straight narrative line,' an artistic choice she suggests may have resulted from him 'thinking of the book in more commercial terms.' Whether this was the case or not, the book is a compelling account of Kerouac's boyhood in the northern Massachusetts town of Lowell, an elegaic, occasionally heartbreaking recreation of the past in which he seldom hesitates to portray his naïve adolescent self in a painfully unflattering light. It is in some respects his most honest book and, in my view, one of the most emotionally affecting works of thinly-disguised fiction he ever published.
Kerouac's alter-ego is sixteen year old Jack Duluoz ('duluoz' means 'louse' in the Québécois dialect he grew up speaking), a gifted high school athlete who, despite his talents on the football field and varsity running track, is very much the awkward adolescent struggling to come to terms with the complexities of love and adult life. Known as Zagg to his friends Vinny, Lousy, Scotty, Iddyboy and the worldly wise GJ 'Mouse' Rigopoulos, he's a sentimental dreamer, a boy capable of finding poetry in the most mundane of situations. 'In the gray afternoons Jacky Duluoz rushed home sweating in November and December,' we're told quite early on, 'to sit in the gloom at the kitchen table, devouring, over a chess book, whole boxes of Ritz crackers with peanut butter smeared… Through the kitchen door in the hall he rushed down pell-mell to find his friends, using the front stairs down the front rooms of the tenement only with parents and company and for sadder more formal runs— The back stairs were so dim, dusty, strange, as if loose-plastered, some day he would remember them in rueful dreams of rust and loss… No idea in 1939 that the world would turn mad.'
But that madness has yet to reveal itself. New Year's Eve of 1938 finds Jack trudging through the thick winter snow of Lowell with his rambunctious friends, their destination the town's Rex Ballroom and the annual end-of-year dance being held there. It's at this dance that Jack is introduced to the seventeen year old Irish-American girl Maggie Cassidy, a resident of South Lowell on the other side of the Merrimack River which runs through the center of the grimy mill town they both call home. 'I saw her,' Jack recalls, 'standing in the crowd, forlorn, dissatisfied, dark, unpleasantly strange. Half reluctantly we were brought together and paraded to the floor arm in arm.' Maggie wastes no time once they start dancing, gossiping about their mutual acquaintances, assuring Jack that he's going to be a big success in life and enquiring, none too delicately, if he has a steady girlfriend. It turns out that Jack does have a girlfriend of sorts — Pauline Cole, a girl who stands no chance of keeping him now that he's met Maggie and become enraptured by her vivacity and the occasionally maudlin outlook so reminiscent of his own melancholy view of life. 'Boy and girl, arms around each other, Maggie and Jack, in the sad ball floor of life, already crestfallen, corners of the mouth giving up, shoulders loosening to hang, frowns, minds forewarned — love is bitter, death is sweet.'
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| Panther Books UK, c 1960 |
The disparity in their ages, seemingly of little importance to begin with, soon comes to define their relationship. Jack is sixteen but emotionally immature. Maggie, on the other hand, is seventeen and yearns to be loved by a man rather than adored by a handsome but inexperienced boy who will soon be leaving Lowell to attend prep school followed by college. Although she and Jack spend many tender hours necking at her house, they never attempt to satisfy their growing lust by having sexual intercourse. (This was the 1930s, when in theory, if not always in practice, adherents of the Catholic faith were expected to remain celibate until marriage.) "I wish you were older," Maggie breathlessly confesses during one of their more passionate make-out sessions. When Jack asks why, she answers, a little wistfully but not untruthfully: "You'd know more what to do with me—".
This is perhaps the most significant sentence in the entire novel. As much as he believes at times that he would like nothing better than to marry his unsettled and unsettling Irish sweetheart, Jack is no more capable, at sixteen, of giving Maggie the poor but stable life she dreams of having than he is, with his habit of self-dramatization and lack of practical sexual knowledge, of meeting her expectations as a lover. As appealing as the idea of marrying her may occasionally be — exchanging what promises to be a stellar football career for a job as a brakeman on the railroad alongside Maggie's own father, occupying a small house by the river where they will raise a large family together — Jack has his own aspirations to think of, aspirations that will provide him with educational and social opportunities otherwise unavailable to a French-Canadian boy of his humble upbringing.
Jack earns his scholarship soon enough — a generous one to the Horace Mann prep school in New York City which will offer a star athlete like himself guaranteed admission to Columbia University following the completion of the required courses. But even this change in his fortunes is not enough to end his increasingly frustrating relationship with Maggie who, after unabashedly kissing one of his rivals for her affections while playing spin-the-bottle at his own seventeenth birthday party, is beginning to lose interest in him. 'I pored like a big baby over the thought of losing my home and going off into unknown suicides of weddings and honeymoons… "You don't love me," she'd say with my lips in her throat. Okay, I said nothing. I had a lot of sawdust to work on in my poor kewpie doll. Sometimes, like my little sister used to do, I'd pretend to be asleep when Maggie said mad things. I didn't know what to do.' Maggie, aware of his confusion, begins to date his rival, making Jack's final spring at home a peculiar kind of torment which he attempts to relieve by pushing himself hard to become as adept at baseball as he is at football. 'We rushed to Shedd Park after the third bell on drowsy late April afternoons and clutched our gloves and spikes; it was heartbreaking because it was so close to South Lowell, I'd look over the trees above the cinder track… beyond the last tennis courts, in the grieving birch, the first roofs of neighborhood Lowell— Then at night, after supper, I'd come along the river— well she got tired of all that. Finally the night we had a date she broke it herself and just wandered off to talk to Roger R in the bushes by the railroad bridge— in the sexy sand—'.
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| Folio France, c 2000 |
Fall eventually arrives and Jack leaves for his new school in New York City, moving into the spare room of his grandmother's apartment in Brooklyn where, in a further effort to put his romance with Maggie behind him, he surrounds himself with books and spends his days attending football practice, exploring the city and having his first sexual experience with an old redheaded prostitute. Having entirely lived up to his new coach's expectations of him as a football player, he also becomes a popular student at Horace Mann with 'about fifty crazy screaming friends who climbed the steep hill from the subway to the palace of the school in the red mornings always haunted by new birds.' Maggie and his old life in Lowell seem very far away until, one day out of the blue, he receives a letter from her in which she begs him to forgive her and states her intention to date nobody else but him from now on. Flattered by her renewed desire for him, Jack invites Maggie to be his date for his spring prom — an important event on the prep school social calendar and one which, fortunately, is still several months away. To make sure of Maggie's love, Jack travels back to Lowell in November where, following a typically passionate and typically frustrating reunion, he admits that he's as much in love with her as ever and faithfully promises to visit her again at Christmas.
This second visit, eagerly anticipated by both parties, sees Maggie demand that he 'do to her what I did to "them girls in New York"—' while they're sitting on her porch on New Year's Eve, exactly one year to the day since they were first introduced at the Rex Ballroom. But Jack can't bring himself to satisfy Maggie's desires despite telling his mother, when he arrives home feeling conflicted and more than a little sorry for himself, that he loves the girl and definitely plans to marry her. His mother advises him to wait, reminding him that he needs to focus on his schoolwork and arrange for Maggie to join him for his prom as they originally planned to have her do. By then, his mother clearly hopes, he will have come to his senses and realized that Maggie, sweet though she can sometimes be, will never make the right sort of wife for a boy with such a promising future ahead of him.
The night of the prom arrives and Jack comes to collect Maggie from her aunt's house in the Bronx (this is where she and her mother are staying while visiting the city) dressed in a borrowed white tuxedo, his face 'lobster red' after undergoing a botched sun lamp treatment. Although Maggie herself is wearing a pink ballgown — 'the best thing she has' — she's not in a party frame of mind, feeling intimidated by the city, scornful of Jack's sophisticated friends and envious of the prettier, more expensively dressed girls they've brought along as their dates. She wants Jack to take her away from the dance so they can be alone together and, when he sheepishly explains that arrangements have already been made for them to attend a post-prom party with his classmates, petulantly informs him that she preferred the old Jack who used to sit on her porch and neck with her in the moonlight. She wants that Jack to love her, she says, not this pretend New Yorker who, she predicts, will burn himself out "like a moth jumping in a locomotive boiler looking for light."
Wounded by Maggie's remarks, Jack abandons his plan to take her to his friends' party and, the next day, conducts her on a dismal tour of the city she openly despises — a tour that ends at the home of her aunt who has prepared a sumptuous Sunday feast in their honor. But Jack has already faced the facts and concluded, with considerable regret, that everything is lost between them. 'After dinner heartbrokenly,' he confesses, 'I sat across the parlor from Maggie and watched her, half sleepy, as they [her relatives] talked— like home, dinners, drowsy in the parlor, the sweet legs of Maggie— Her dark eyes scanned me contemptuously— She'd said her piece— Mrs Cassidy saw we werent [sic] getting along— The big expedition, plans, the big prom, flowers, — all down the drain.'
Maggie returns to Lowell the next day and Jack returns to prep school and his new independent life, discovering jazz and everything else the city has to offer a curious and energetic young man in the dizzying spring of 1940 while war rages in Europe and army life becomes the primary topic of conversation at every social gathering. Yet despite these and many other adventures — including stints of hitch-hiking and sleeping rough in railroad cars and hobo camps — Jack can never fully succeed in banishing the memory of Maggie and their doomed romance from his mind.
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| Penguin Books US, 2010 |
Three years after their break-up Jack returns from Lowell, finally ready to do what Maggie wanted him to do all along — make a 'real' woman of her by taking her to bed. He borrows a car from a local garage and goes to pick her up, certain in his heart that he's destined to 'find out about you at last… —So don't manage me off tonight, I'll slap your wrist, I'll drive you inta rivers, I'll show ya—'. But his arrogance proves unjustified. He arrives at Maggie's house to find it and her fundamentally unchanged even though she tells him — not without a certain degree of smugness — that he has changed a lot since they last met. Undeterred by her slyly negative assessment of his character, Jack drives them back to the garage where, to his great frustration, 'the sweetness of the girl was hidden from the boy by a thick rubber girdle at which he pulled and yanked, desperate drunk, poised at the gate.' Jack never passes the gate. Dismissing him as the same fumbling klutz he always was, Maggie laughs in his face, after which he has no choice except to drive her home and then back to town alone 'skittering crazily in the slush, sick, cursing.'
It may be difficult for those who admire Kerouac's most famous novel On The Road (1957) to find any trace of its benzedrine popping hipster narrator Sal Paradise in the bumbling, occasionally forlorn figure of Jack 'Zagg' Duluoz. But Sal is there in the young Jack's romantic vision of himself as a kind of contemporary North American hero, living his own myth even as he appears to be creating it. Sal is also there in the rhythm of Kerouac's poetic, beautifully cadenced prose. (If you disagree with the latter statement, try reading one of the longer passages I've quoted aloud to yourself and you'll hear how good a writer he was when he was at the top of his game.) In fact, it's not unreasonable to suggest that Maggie Cassidy is as much about the attempt to reconstruct the past using the tool of language as it is about the love affair between its unworldly narrator and the elusive, almost dream-like figure of its title character. It's not so much who Maggie is as what she represents that haunts and fascinates Kerouac, a writer whose best work — like that of his earliest literary idol Thomas Wolfe — was always about the interconnected roles that dream and memory play in shaping how his characters view and respond to each other and the world. While the book works as a heartrending coming-of-age tale, it is ultimately a lot more than that — Kerouac's courageous (and not always affectionate) attempt, according to Ann Charters, to 'glimpse himself again as most adolescents see themselves, at once unable to deal with the immensities of life and at the same time blessed with the feeling of uniqueness of their own experience.' The impressionistic recreation of lived experience was Kerouac's greatest gift as a writer and nowhere did he utilize it more effectively than in this, his sixth published novel.
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| JACK KEROUAC, c 1959 |
The Writer: Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac — a Breton name spelled in a variety of ways — was born on 12 March 1922 in Lowell, a textile town roughly thirty miles north of Boston that had been virtually brand new when it had been visited by an admiring English novelist named Charles Dickens in 1842. By the time Kerouac's parents Léo-Alcide and Gabrielle Ange (née Levesque, a Norman rather than a Breton name) moved from the neighboring state of New Hampshire to the poor and predominantly French-Canadian neighborhood of Pawtuckettville with their two older children Gérard and Caroline (known as 'Nin' to her family) any sense of novelty that Lowell had once possessed had well and truly worn off. By then Lowell was just another grimy Massachusetts mill town, home to a large population of Québécois immigrants who, like Kerouac's paternal and maternal ancestors, had come to the United States in search of steady employment. Whatever its shortcomings, the town would serve as the emotional center of Kerouac's autobiographical universe, a place he would remain strongly attached to if not physically present in throughout all of his short but eventful life.
Kerouac, who was called 'Ti Jean' [Little John] by his family, allegedly only spoke French until the age of six and did not become fully fluent in English until his mid teens. He was by that time his parents' only son, his elder brother Gérard having died of rheumatic fever in 1926 — an event he would revisit in his moving 1963 (written in 1956) novel Visions of Gérard. Kerouac was traumatized by his brother's death and believed, right up until his own death on 21 October 1969, that Gérard was his guardian angel — a deeply Catholic view of familial love and spirituality instilled in him by his devout and doting mother. His father, by contrast, viewed the death of his eldest son as proof of God's non-existence and turned away from the church, becoming a heavy drinker and gambler while continuing to pursue a career as a traveling linotypist. Kerouac himself never fully abandoned his Catholic faith, retaining it even when, in later years, he became immersed in the study and practice of Buddhism.
Although he was fond of reading as a boy and also enjoyed writing poetry, these pursuits were not Kerouac's ruling passions at that time. He was far more interested in football, a game he came to excel at in the position of running back during his senior year of high school. So impressive were his achievements on the gridiron that he was soon offered football scholarships by Boston College and the universities of Notre Dame and Columbia. He eventually accepted the Columbia offer and, after graduating in 1939 and saying goodbye to his pretty and slightly older Irish-American girlfriend Mary Carney (the model for Maggie Cassidy), entered the Horace Mann School in New York City to begin his college prep courses.
Kerouac started at Columbia in September 1940, only to split a bone in his leg in late October while playing in a game against St Benedict's Prep School. This injury, devastating to him at the time, proved to be fortuitous in a number of ways, allowing him to play the wounded hero around campus while he pursued his burgeoning interests in the work of Thomas Wolfe — Wolfe's debut novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929) would become a crucial influence on his own writing — contemporary jazz and, once he was fit enough to walk without a cane, hitch-hiking.
Although Kerouac's leg recovered, his football career did not. He spent 'a nutty summer at home' in Lowell, having a humiliating reunion with Mary Carney and reconnecting with his best friend Alex Sampas (the model for GJ 'Mouse' Rigopoulos) with whom he spent long hours discussing literature and politics when he should have been studying for the chemistry exam he needed to pass in order to keep his scholarship. He also continued to work on the short stories he had now begun to write in imitation of Ernest Hemingway and William Saroyan, the latter becoming another key influence on his future writing style. His parents temporarily moved from Lowell to the town of New Haven in Connecticut at the end of the summer and were still living here when, in September 1941, he returned to Columbia as a sophomore.
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| MARY CARNEY, c 1940 |
Life was now very different at Columbia. Many of its star athletes, certain war was coming despite the assurances of President Roosevelt that the US would not become directly involved in what was being dismissed as a 'European conflict,' had dropped out to enlist in the armed forces. With so much of his former competition suddenly gone, Kerouac no longer saw any point in remaining in school and dropped out himself, deciding that he too would enlist. His parents were furious when he arrived in New Haven to tell them the news, insisting that he get a job immediately to repay them for everything they'd sacrificed so he could be the first member of the family to obtain a college education.
Kerouac found work pumping gas and moved into a furnished room of his own, but returned to Lowell with his parents a few weeks later to take a job as a sports reporter on the town's Sun newspaper. He didn't stick with reporting for long and was soon on the move again, spending time in Washington DC and then in Boston where, afraid to face his disapproving parents, he impulsively enlisted in the Marine Corps. Disappointed to learn that he wouldn't be immediately inducted but would have to go home and wait to receive his official call-up notice, he then walked up the street and enlisted in the Coast Guard before rounding off the evening by going on an extended drinking binge. When he awoke the next morning, broke and hungover and scared he might be arrested for enlisting in two separate branches of the armed forces on the same day, he decided that the only way he could avoid going to jail was to join the Merchant Marine and ship out on the first available boat.
In the spring of 1942 Kerouac signed on as a scullion aboard the SS Dorchester, a ship carrying airstrip construction workers from Boston to Greenland that was frequently targeted by prowling German u-boats. The voyage, which he later described as 'a kind of holiday,' earned him $470 and a lot of valuable experience which became the basis for his first novel The Sea Is My Brother, a clumsily written apprentice work that would not be published until 2011.
Kerouac left the SS Dorchester in October and returned to Lowell where his father relayed the news that Lou Little, coach of the Columbia Yearlings, wanted him back on the team. Although Kerouac returned to the campus and re-enrolled in all his former courses, he dropped out of college again after his first game because Little kept him on the bench. This time, his abandonment of football and the world of academia proved to be permanent. After another stint at home in Lowell, it was agreed that his best prospect would be to join the navy and train as an officer. He lasted less than six months in the navy and, following a period of psychiatric observation in Bethesda Hospital in Maryland, was honorably discharged for having what the attending physician described as an 'indifferent character.' It was June 1943 and his life seemed as directionless as ever despite his having met Edie Parker, a fellow Columbia student who, one year later, would become his wife under what were to be highly unusual circumstances.
As he'd always done, Kerouac moved in with his parents who were now living in the Ozone Park section of Brooklyn, having left Lowell to seek more lucrative war jobs in New York. Within a few months he was back at sea, this time as an ordinary seaman aboard the SS George Weems, a ship bound for the English port of Liverpool with several tons of unexploded ordnance stowed in its hold. The ship was attacked by the German navy during its homeward run, making Kerouac wary of immediately signing on for another voyage following its safe return to New York. He spent the winter of 1943-1944 dividing his time between Brooklyn and the apartment of Edie Parker where, with the failure of his first novel behind him, he began thinking of himself as a 'serious' writer who should not be frittering his time away on journalism — a view shared by Lucien Carr, a new Columbia friend of Edie's whom she had met while Jack had been at sea and someone, it turned out, who shared his desire to write.
Through the flamboyant and academically gifted Carr, Kerouac would soon meet Harvard dropout and heroin addict William Seward Burroughs, someone else interested in writing whose various careers — anthropologist, bartender, office clerk, exterminator among many others — had been every bit as accidental and aimless as his own. Carr also introduced Kerouac to Dave Kammerer, an alleged homosexual (this claim was later disputed by other people who had been friendly with Kammerer at the time) who appeared to have developed an unrequited passion for Kerouac's handsome new friend, often writing essays for the boy and even breaking into his dorm room late one night so he could watch Carr sleep. (This claim was also disputed in later years, with some of Kammerer's friends suggesting that Carr had been the obsessive party in the relationship.)
The situation with Kammerer reached crisis point on 13 August 1944 when a visibly distressed Carr burst into Edie's apartment just after dawn to beg Kerouac for his help. Although he and Kerouac had spent much of the previous day together after being thrown off a ship whose crew they had unsuccessfully attempted to join, Carr had not gone home after they had parted outside the West End Bar, a popular hang-out for proto-beatniks and petty criminals alike. Instead, Carr had gone to Riverside Park with Dave Kammerer and continued to drink, only to stab Kammerer with the scout knife he had adopted the habit of carrying after, according to him, the much larger and stronger Kammerer had made violent sexual advances toward him. Carr had been to see Burroughs before coming to Kerouac, with Burroughs advising him to contact his family and surrender himself to the authorities.
Carr ignored that advice and sought out Kerouac instead, hoping the latter would help him dispose of the murder weapon and some of the dead man's belongings. Kerouac did this and afterwards they went to the movies and visited the Museum of Modern Art together where they spent an hour or so looking at paintings. Carr then went to his mother's house and from there to the office of the District Attorney to whom he told his version of the murder story. Later that night, Kerouac was arrested by the police, taken to the 98th Precinct station house and charged with the crime of being a material witness to a homicide.
When Kerouac called his father to ask him to pay his bail, Léo refused, making Edie his only hope of being released. To ensure her wealthy Michigan family would send her the money required to bail him out, Edie recommended that she and Kerouac get married, which they soon did at city hall with Carr's girlfriend Cecily and a detective serving as witnesses. His bail paid and soon reconciled with his parents (who were happy to see him married despite the bizarre series of events which had preceded his nuptials), Kerouac went to live with Edie and her family in Michigan where, eager to earn his keep, he quickly found a war job counting ball bearings in a munitions factory. He felt uncomfortable with Edie's family and its privileged Grosse Pointe lifestyle and quickly concluded that the marriage, though it had seemed necessary at the time, had been a big mistake.
Kerouac remained in Michigan until October when he said goodbye to Edie and hitch-hiked back to New York in the hope of finding a ship leaving for Europe that he might be able to join. It was here he learned that Carr had been convicted of manslaughter and sent to the state reformatory at Elmira for two years. (The plea of manslaughter ensured that Kerouac was not called as a trial witness or charged with the more serious offence of being an accessory after the fact which, as an adult, could have seen him sent to prison.) He and Cecily went out for a drink to commiserate over Carr's fate and were joined by another Columbia student named Allen Ginsberg whom Kerouac had met a few times but had never felt any particular sense of kinship with. This now changed as they realized they shared a mutual interest in literature which, in Ginsberg's case, had instilled in him the desire to follow in the footsteps of his hero the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud.
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| CARR, JK, GINSBERG and BURROUGHS, c 1945 |
Soon Kerouac was living in his new friend's room on the Columbia campus in defiance of college regulations, reading voraciously and writing, often all through the night, while he hid from his family and avoided speaking with his wife back in Grosse Pointe. Edie eventually returned to her old apartment in the city which, in the words of Ginsberg, became a kind of 'commune' which played host to a variety of casual visitors and overnight guests. The arrangement also confirmed Kerouac's belief that he no longer wished to be married to Edie, with him leaving it up to her to arrange for an annulment.
The one constant throughout this period of chaos was Kerouac's unwavering commitment to his writing. This was consolidated by his experiments with benzedrine, an over-the-counter medication that allowed him to work non-stop for extended periods of time and placed him, he believed, in a heightened state of consciousness. After confiding to Ginsberg that he planned to use the drug to write money-making magazine stories, he quickly realized how futile this would be and began another novel he provisionally titled Galloway after the name of the fictional town, based closely on Lowell, that was to be its primary setting.
This novel, which he worked on consistently between 1945 and 1949, would be published by Harcourt Brace in 1950 under the more Wolfean title The Town and the City, its twenty-eight year old author identified on the cover as 'John Kerouac.' By then Kerouac had already made several manic cross-country roadtrips with another new friend named Neal Cassady whom he'd met in late 1946 or early 1947 (sources disagree). Meeting Cassady, son of a divorced alcoholic barber who had mostly grown up in Denver flophouses and had also spent many months in reform schools, changed his life and had a profound influence on his work, an influence that culminated in Cassady being immortalized as 'Dean Moriarty' — 'a sideburned hero of the snowy west' — in his second published novel On The Road (1957).
That, of course, all lay ahead of Kerouac in the 1940s, as did his increasingly burdensome role as spokesman for the Beat Generation, a term coined by him ('You could call us a beat generation' he is reputed to have said) and used as the title of a magazine article written by another friend, the novelist John Clellon Holmes. But, as so often happens with North American writers, success and fame were accompanied by feelings of ambivalence and conflict that, in Kerouac's case, would lead directly to his death, in Florida far from Lowell and its associated memories, from chronic alcoholism at the age of forty-seven.
Use the link below to visit The Kerouac Center at the University of Massachusetts in the writer's hometown of Lowell, 'a collaborative, interdisciplinary engagement center broadly focused on the work of Lowell, Massachusetts native Jack Kerouac, as well as the cultural, political, and intellectual history shaping Kerouac during the post-World War Two period.'
In May 2012 a musical adaption of Maggie Cassidy, featuring an original score and lyrics composed by CHRIS JEFFRIES, premiered at the University of Indiana in Bloomington starring members of that institution's Theater and Drama Department. Use the link below to listen to a very brief excerpt from the show:
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