Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

Kerouac was born in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts.   With his second novel, On the Road, in 1957,  he achieved widespread fame and notoriety and became a Beat icon.  He published 12 more novels during his life and numerous poetry volumes.

Kerouac is recognized for his style of spontaneous prose.  Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty.  He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements.  He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Doors.

 

About Jack  Keroauc at the Jack Kerouac Society website

Jack Kerouac Wikipedia page

 

Image credit – Kerouac_by_Palumbo.jpg: Tom Palumbo from New York, NY, USAderivative work: Sir Richardson at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The cemetery website is https://www.lowellma.gov/258/Jack-Kerouacs-Grave

• Enter the cemetery through the main gate on Gorham Street
• Continue down 3rd Avenue and take a left onto Lincoln Avenue
• After you pass 7th Avenue pull, over to the right side of the road
• Jack Kerouac’s grave will be on the passenger’s side of the car
• His grave has a flat marker approximately 10 feet in front on a larger, upright monument with his signature engraved