Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac was 47 when he died in 1969; his death certificate listing the cause as gastrointestinal hemorrhage due to bleeding gastric varix from cirrhosis of liver, the result of “many years of excessive ethanol intake.”

To the world he was Jack Kerouac, the famed novelist of the beat generation and author of On the Road. To his mother, Gabriella, he was her “Ti-Jean,” and to his only child, Jan Kerouac – well, she knew him not, having met him twice – the second visit when she was fifteen and two years before his death when, as she told biographer Gerald Nicosia, “He was drunk, sitting in front of the TV, in a rocking chair, watching The Beverly Hillbillies and drinking from a quart of whiskey.”

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