Kerouac's Town and City

Kerouac: Visions of Lowell
foreword by Allen Ginsberg
by John J Dorfner
Cooper Street Publications, 1993
ISBN 0-9636046-7-8
Paper, 5.5"x8.5", 60 pp
copiously illustrated with b/w photographs
$11. 95, shipped, U.S.

Publisher releases second printing of Kerouac: Visions of Lowell

In Lowell, Dorfner writes, "...everything Kerouac witnessed became a rare and uncommon view of life." Combining Kerouac's words with his own humble prose, Dorfner reveals through words and photographs the real places where Jack lived, walked, learned and had visions.
Dorfner's book is not simply another walking tour of Lowell. For more than 20 years, Dorfner has read and re-read Kerouac's works, connecting his own life experiences with his intimate familiarity of Jack. In search of Kerouac's past, Dorfner enters into the soul and mind of the man whose writing spirit was born here, taking form in his early childhood and evolving uniquely through his relationships with friends and lovers and the family he embraced there. Lowell was, ultimately, an unattainable dream for Jack. "Kerouac was always looking for a way to get home" Dorfner writes. "But for him...after leaving Lowell...that was impossible."
Sadly, perhaps ironically, Kerouac did find his way home again at the age of 47. "Jack Kerouac sleeps peacefully behind the black iron gates of Edson Cemetery in Lowell, born March 1922, gone home in October of 1969...to stay."
Lowell, Massachusetts remains the pilgrimage it was for Kerouac, and for literary devotees of his writing. "Kerouac made Lowell sacred by his attention to it," Allen Ginsberg writes in his foreword to Dorfner's book. Lowell, the birthplace of Jack Kerouac and his singular voice is the place where he will forever spend "the enternity of his short life."



Kerouac: Visions of Rocky Mount
by John J Dorfner
Cooper Street Publications, 1991
ISBN 0-9636046-4-3
Paper, 5.5"x8.5"
70 pp, copiously with b/w photographs
$11.95, shipped, U.S.


Kerouac's voyage of discovery was launched in North Carolina

Tucked into an elbow of the Tar River, where it stops heading north and turns at last eastward to the Atlantic Ocean, among the fiertile fields and forests of the coastal plain, the unassuming hamlet of Rocky Mount goes on about its everyday business.
The people of Rocky Mount don't go pointing out the fact that in the 1950's, Jack Kerouac took his retreat there at the home of his sister Carolyn, returning again and again between road trips and adventures, finding comfort and purpose in the bosom of his family.
At Carolyn's kitchen table, Kerouac wrote the most heartfelt of all his novels, Visions of Gerard was a sacrament for his long-dead perfect saint of a brother, a child of nine who'd died when Jack was just four.
Rocky Mount was more than just a place to rest and write. For Kerouac, it was a fertile womb where his budding Buddhist spirituality could be nurtured. He wandered into the holy woods along the rill he named Buddha Creek and claimed a shrine of nature he called Twin Tree Grove. In this sacred place he chanted and meditated, trying not to think, while the curious dogs and cats who followed him from the back yard kept a hopeful vigil.
In Kerouac: Visions of Rocky Mount, John J Dorfner follows these trails made by Jack and his animal friends, finding and photographing all of Kerouac's hallowed places. Using Jack's won words as they were recorded in numerous books, Dorfner gives readers a real sense of places as mighty as old battlefields, as eloquent as the ruins of ancient civilizations.
It was from the town of Rocky Mount that Kerouac embarked on his first cross-country trip with his friend, Neal Cassady. From these journeys came his signature work, On the Road.
But his family's influence, always strong, also motivated him in Rocky Mount. A neighbor recalls the time when Jack went into the television repair business to please his brother-in-law, Paul Blake. "He was going to learn the trade," she recalls. "But a couple days later he was standing at the door with his knapsack all packed full and that was the end of that."
Kerouac's final attempt at making a straight living may have ended in Rocky Mount, but not his visions, which he considered the true reality of his life. Following the death of Charilie "bird" Parker, the great saxophone player, on Jack's 33rd birthday, Kerouac plunged into an epiphany that changed his life. He received enlightenment, the "simple and glorious truth." As he wrote in The Dharma Bums a few years later, "After a while my meditations and studies began to bear fruit. It really started in late January, one frosty night in the woods in the dead silence it seemed I almost heart the words said: "Everything is all right forever and forever and forever."
Dorfner wrote the book as a "dedication to Jack Kerouac, a man set adrift from others." His poignant prose and eyewitness musings add dimension to Kerouac's days there, a testament to the spirit of Rocky Mount that affected Jack for all of his life.