The man who lived faster than others could see: Jack Kerouac, king of the beats, was born 100 years ago.
Jack Kerouac intones “One fast move or I’m gone” like a refrain at the beginning of “Big Sur”, his novel about how everything should be different. In the summer of 1960, at age 38, he retired to a cabin in the woods on the California coast that belonged to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, his poet-publicist friend. “On the Road” had been released three years earlier, the breathless and iconoclastic epic of longing for a post-war America, which left nothing for Sal Paradise and his wacky friends to hitchhike through the landscape from east to west – and back, always on the way to hot jazz clubs, harden Drugs, easy women – wild poetry that made its author famous overnight.