06/02/2026
Jack Kerouac’s brother Gerard died 100 years ago, on June 2, 1926. Gerard was 9 when he died; Jack was 4.
Kerouac had worshipped his older brother. Gerard had been the centre of his world, as he recounted years later:
"For the first four years of my life, while he lived, I was not Ti Jean Duluoz, I was Gerard, the world was his face, the flower of his face, the pale stooped disposition, the heartbreakingness and the holiness and his teachings of tenderness to me, and my mother constantly reminding me to pay attention to his goodness and advice." (Visions of Gerard, p.7-8)
Following Gerard’s death, Jack’s mother and father took out their pain on him, making his own suffering worse. Everyone around him seemed to have viewed Gerard as saint-like and so Jack spent the rest of his life trying and failing to live up to that impossible image.
Kerouac also spent the rest of his life looking for a new older brother. He found one in Neal Cassady, whom he sometimes compared to Gerard. In 1955, he wrote Cassady to say:
"I’m not too sure that maybe you arent my brother Gerard reborn, because he died in the summer of 1926 and you were born. . . when? in 1927." (Selected Letters 1940-56, p.472)
Cassady had actually been born a few months before Gerard’s death. Oddly—and Kerouac does not seem to have realised this—Allen Ginsberg was born the following day (June 3).
Kerouac wrote Visions of Gerard (which he called his “best most serious sad and true book yet”) in December 1955 and January 1956. In that book, he said he became a writer because of his brother:
"The whole reason why I ever wrote at all and drew breath to bite in vain with pen of ink, great gad with indefensible Usable pencil, because of Gerard, the idealism, Gerard the religious hero--'Write in honour of his death!' (Écrivez pour l’amour de son mort)" (Visions of Gerard, p.132)
Kerouac was proud of the book and perhaps more attached to it than other novels because of its subject, Gerard. It hurt that publishers were initially not interested but it hurt far more when it was released in 1963 and savaged by critics. Kerouac wrote:
"everybody’s become so mean, so sinister, so hypocritical I can’t believe it. So I turn to drink like a lost maniac… They make me feel like never writing another word again" (Selected Letters 1957-69, p.370)
