Today in Kerouac history

In his journal on this date in 1948, Jack Kerouac wrote:

Today felt like a lucky day, I received my bonus check. I said to myself, "What next?" Wrote 1000-words more on chapter, good definitive ones. The remainder hangs over my happy conscience. Things are swinging in me . . .*

Jack is talking about his G.I. Bill check and work on his first published novel, The Town and the City. Even when he was writing his novels he also kept a journal and always had something with him to write with (note what's sticking out of his pocket above).

Writers write, and Jack was truly the embodiment of that aphorism.




* From Douglas Brinkley's Windblown World, p. 75.