Use My Name: Jack Kerouac's Forgotten Families

Use My Name: Jack Kerouac's Forgotten Families

Language: English

Pages: 203

ISBN: 1550223755

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


With this fascinating new book, Jim Jones debunks many of the myths surrounding the life and times of Jack Kerouac. Jones concentrates on those whose lives were most affected by Kerouac: daughter Jan Kerouac, wives Edie Parker, Joan Haverty, and Stella Sampac, as well as nephew Paul Blake Jr. Use My Name: Jack Kerouac's Forgotten Families takes its title from advice given to Jan during her second and final meeting with Jack, who encouraged her to profit from the surname she shared with the famous author of On the Road. Sadly, not one of these individuals so closely tied to Kerouac seems to have benefited from the connection, as Jones discovers in his in-depth interview with Jan. She discusses at length her 15 months as a prostitute, her own divorces, her hospitalization, and her life as an author, including a wild European book tour for Baby Driver. Although Kerouac is one of the most “biographied” American writers of our time, Jones offers a new perspective on the King of the Beats and his generation, one in which formerly marginalized figures in the Kerouac story—particularly women—become strong, central characters. He also exposes the cut-throat wheeling and dealing that has plagued the Kerouac estate and that continues today as the various players do battle over the legacy of one of the counterculture's biggest idols.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

just then coming up for copyright renewal, until 1993, when something — I myself am still not completely sure what — changed all that. But John still insists — and I believe him, though Jan's supporters would not, of course — that if she had asked, he would have given her a share of her father's estate, a share equal in value to his or his brothers' and sister's. He even claims to have invited her to come live with him in Lowell (an invitation which, from my experience, he's lucky she didn't

don't know, in a parallel universe, if I had enough chance, I might turn out to just be a person who is prone to drinking again anyway. So I don't even know if I would have power over myself to say, "I'm not gonna drink this time." [ . . . ] JIM: I just have one more question. JAN: Oh. JIM: Did being a prostitute or being a stripper give you a sense of power over men? Because I think that's something that a lot of people in those professions describe. JAN: Yeah, it did. And yet I guess I was

life. She began to wonder why she was bothering to set down the events of her recent past. Cynically, she was moved to summarize her adventures in Latin America in a single paragraph. Finally, she concluded that no excuse was necessary. In Trainsong she set down her thoughts: I liked to think that reasons weren't needed at all. I'd always been fond of the notion that things just happened like cards falling or dice clicketing from the random hands of Fate. It was easier that way — no

Jan gained a revolutionary insight into her own situation from Steinbeck: she learned she was entitled to royalties from her father's works. Since the copyright law at that time still specified that the first renewal came twenty-seven years after publication, and they were in Boulder 1 5 8 U S E M Y N A M E to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of On the Road, Jan would soon be eligible to add her name to that of Stella Sampas on the copyright page of her father's

three distinct phases of Kerouac's life: the formative years of his early adulthood during World War 11, the beginning of his life on the road, and his return to his hometown late in life to recreate the sense of stability and family he had lost in his wanderings. First came Frankie "Edie" Parker, the daughter of a thricemarried Detroit woman, reared in some degree of affluence, thanks especially to her grandmother, who was the proximate cause of Edie's meeting Kerouac. When Edie quit high school

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