"study and absorption of primary Buddhist material."
Kerouac's upbringing was both conventional and touched by tragedy. The loss of an elder brother in childhood, deeply affected his emotional sensibility and his ability to cope with life, but it did not prevent him from dealing with conflicted issue fronts of death and complicated relationships in his narratives. His rather conventional family lived through the Great Depression and otherwise was integrated into the surrounding community, and his academic and physical gifts enabled him to earn a scholarship to Columbia University, where he abandoned sports and seems to have been an indifferent student but where he also read extensively and began a lifetime of writing prose and poetry--with irregular success, except for the resonant influence of On the Road, published in 1957. During World War II, he served in the merchant marine, having been discharged from the Navy for psychological reasons. After the war he cultivated literary friendships with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs in New York, publishing a first novel in 1950. In New York he befriended one Neal Cassady, also a member of that circle, and joined him in extended travel across the country. That experience became the basis for On the Road.
Though none of Kerouac's prose or poetry resonated as social criticism and social chronicle as On the Road did, Kerouac is recognized, along with Ginsberg and Burroughs, as one of the founding fathers of the Beat Generation, the name given to an ethos and lifestyle linked to bohemian and hedonistic men and women of letters and art that were "centred in the bohemian artist communities of San Francisco's North Beach, Los Angeles' Venice West, and New York City's Greenwich Village." The literary and artistic output of the "beats," or "beatniks," as they were commonly called, articulated alienation from conventional, bourgeois/materialist, "square" society and made something of a pro...