Effortless English LEVEL 3 | LESSON 5 Jack Kerouac, King of The Beats |LEARN ENGLISH EVERYDAY

Effortless English LEVEL 3 | LESSON 5 Jack Kerouac, King of The Beats |LEARN ENGLISH EVERYDAY
Jack Kerouac was an American novelist, writer, poet, and artist.
While enjoying popularity but little critical success during his own
lifetime, Kerouac is now considered one of America's most important
authors. His spontaneous, confessional prose style inspired many
other writers, including Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Hunter S.
Thompson, and Bob Dylan.
Kerouac's best known works are On the Road, The Dharma Bums,
Big Sur and Visions of Cody.
He divided most of his adult life between roaming the vast American
landscape and living with his mother. Faced with a changing country,
Kerouac sought to find his place, eventually rejecting the conservative values of the 1950s. His writing often reflects a desire to break
free from society's structures and to find meaning in life.
This search led him to experiment with drugs and to embark on
trips around the world. His books are often credited as the catalyst
for the 1960s counterculture.
Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to a family of FrenchCanadians.
Jack didn't start to learn English until the age of six, and at home he
and his family spoke French. At an early age, he was profoundly
marked by the death of his elder brother Gérard, an event that later
prompted him to write the book “Visions of Gerard”.
Kerouac's athletic prowess led him to become a star on his local
football team, and this achievement earned him scholarships to
Boston College and Columbia University. At Columbia, he wrote several sports articles for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily
Spectator.
His football scholarship did not pan out and he went to live with an
old girlfriend, Edie Parker, in New York. It was in New York that