San Francisco, America’s romantic city by the bay, has always been a haven for the artists, writers, and lovers who have left at least part of their hearts there. One of the great American romantics who wrote in San Francisco was Jack Kerouac. Kerouac rewrote the history of an entire postwar generation of youth, forcing them out of their postwar confines and leading them out “on the road.” Born on March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, to a working-class Catholic, French-Canadian family, Kerouac had a typically all-American childhood. He played sandlot baseball, read pulp fiction, and became a high school football star. He entered Columbia University on a football scholarship, but when a leg injury put him out of action on the gridiron, he chose the literary field of work. American literature would never be the same. His romanticized autobiographical novels and wayward travels, which were often the basis of his work, made him the unquestioned king of the Beat Generation writers. Before becoming the father of the San Francisco-based Beat Generation, Kerouac was writing in the bars and basement apartments of New York City’s Lower East and Lower West sides. Here he met and worked with William S. Burrroughs and Allen Ginsberg before they all took their restless spirits west and started a literary and cultural revolution. Kerouac first landed in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1947, hoping to get a berth on a merchant marine ship. Here he soon met his kindred spirit, Neal Cassady, whose frenetic letters and cross-country travels spurred Jack to write On the Road perhaps his preeminent work, in one long paragraph during the month of April 1051. Since the book was written as a simple personal testament “in search of his writing soul,” Kerouac had no idea that On the Road would spur a generation onto the highways and into the tumultuous activism of the Vietnam era a decade later. Almost overnight, Kerouac became a media superstar and even a mythical figure himself. But in the end, he could not live with the myth he created. He split from the ranks of his fellow beat writers, like Geinsberg, and actually voiced support for America’s war effort in Vietnam. Later in his life, he moved back in with is mother, drank too much, and became more and more reactionary. His later years were an ironic turn on the life of freedom he wrote about and lived to a great extent. Still, the stories he created live on within the souls of American youth, the lingering American romantics. -- 怎樣?我是好人吧! --

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