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Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road is widely regarded as a 20th century American classic, but the celebrated author did not necessarily feel like an all-American writer.
Filmmaker Ebs Burnough, the director behind the new documentary Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation, and author Joyce Johnson recently discussed how the film explores Kerouac’s upbringing in a French-Canadian immigrant family in Lowell, Mass., and its long-term impact on his writing.
“I remember Joyce and I talking about the fact that Jack didn’t really start speaking English until he was 6 or 7,” Burnough says. “It’s a minor thing in one sense, and then a really massive thing in another when you think of being French-Canadian, living in Lowell, speaking a different language from the majority of America. I started to have a different sense of what that outsider’s feeling and status was for him.”
Johnson, who knew Kerouac personally and had a romantic relationship with him in the 1950s, wrote a memoir about the late author, who died in 1969 at age 47, titled The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. She says she had “a big hunch” that Kerouac’s French-American background played a larger role in his work and life than many had assumed prior to examining his journals.
“No one had ever made much of it, because it was something he didn’t talk about himself while I knew him, But I didn’t realize until I read his journals [it was a] huge thing,” Johnson says. She recalls reading “a very key passage” in one of Kerouac’s journals from an entry he wrote some time after Labor Day in 1945.
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“He was walking through his neighborhood in Ozone Park in Queens, and he saw all these people in their backyard celebrating in the traditional way with barbecues and so on,” Johnson says. “He realized that this was America. He would only ever be half American. But he felt that as a half American, he could see the country maybe better than somebody who was fully American. So I think people have interpreted On the Road being an all-American book. No, it was really an outsider’s view of America.”
As Johnson tells PEOPLE, having a French-American identity “was very looked down upon in America” in Kerouac’s day and age. She explains that he wrote On the Road’s protagonist as Italian — the book is heavily based on Kerouac’s own experiences and friends in the late 1940s — rather than French-American because “he felt nobody would be interested in that,” which she says he “regretted later on” in life.
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Burnough’s new documentary features interviews with celebrities like Matt Dillon and Josh Brolin, as well as modern-day working class Americans who embody the spirit of Kerouac’s work and the 1950s Beat Generation.
“I do think the whole film is about community. The whole book is about community,” Burnough says. “We are all desperately in search of community, and we’re all on our own individual road. But the great thing is we get to be on our road, but also bump into one another and create this magical community. And that’s the gift from Kerouac.”
Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation is in theaters now.
