Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis Kerouac was born on 12 March 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, into a French-Canadian household, and grew up speaking joual. He learned English at six and spoke with a noticeable accent into his late teens, which matters for the prose: the man who became the great American stylist of the 1950s came to the language from outside it.

He won a football scholarship to Columbia, played running back, broke his leg in his first season, eventually left the team and then the university. In New York he fell in with the people who became the Beat Generation - Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes - and, decisively, with Neal Cassady, whose energy, talk and driving became the subject of the book that made him.

How was On the Road written?

In three weeks in April 1951, in a Manhattan apartment, onto a continuous scroll of tracing paper taped end to end and fed through the typewriter so he would never have to stop to change a sheet. The scroll is about 120 feet long. He called the method spontaneous prose and defended it as a principle: first thought, best thought, minimal revision, structured like a jazz solo rather than like a composition. Publishers were not persuaded, and the book was rejected repeatedly until Viking took it in 1957. The Dharma Bums followed in 1958 and Big Sur, which is about the collapse that fame produced, afterwards. He drank heavily for the rest of his life and died on 21 October 1969 in St Petersburg, Florida, aged forty-seven, of an oesophageal haemorrhage brought on by cirrhosis.

Kerouac is dominant Ne, and spontaneous prose is that function turned into a method. The whole doctrine - do not revise, do not stop, follow the association wherever it goes, trust the first formulation - is a description of Ne being permitted to run without a brake. It is also why the work is so uneven: the same procedure that produces the passages people quote for seventy years produces pages that go nowhere, and he refused on principle to cut either.

The auxiliary Fi is why the books are not simply energetic. Underneath the movement is a permanent ache about home, family, his dead brother Gerard, his mother, Lowell and Catholicism, and the road books are travelling away from something he never stopped mourning. On the Road is usually read as a celebration and reads, in places, as grief with the roof down.

Why did fame destroy Kerouac?

Because inferior Si has no defences and the ENFP's relationship to accumulated bodily consequence is the weakest thing in the stack. He became, at thirty-five, the public spokesman for a movement he had described rather than founded, was asked to be the character in his own book for the rest of his life, and had no structure of routine, discipline or self-management to absorb any of it. Big Sur is the document of that collapse. The tertiary Te appears only in flashes - the sheer productivity, the working method, the fact that he actually finished books - and it was never enough to hold the rest together.

INFP is the most common alternative and a serious one, given the interiority, the Catholicism and the grief. The difference is direction. An Fi-dominant writer works alone toward a private truth; Kerouac's life and work are both organised around other people - Cassady above all - and around motion, company and talk. The values are second, powering an outward, restless, associative engine.

ENTP is occasionally suggested because of the improvisation and the speed. But the improvisation is not analytical. He is not testing ideas, he is chasing feeling, and his objection to revision was that it falsified the emotional truth of the first pass rather than that it weakened the argument.