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Authors
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
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Kerouac’s novels are The Town and the City (1950), On the Road (1957), The Subterraneans (1958), The Dharma Bums (1958), Doctor Sax (1959), Maggie Cassidy (1959), Tristessa (1960), Big Sur (1962), Visions of Gerard (1963), Desolation Angels (1965), Vanity of Duluoz (1968), Pic (1971), and Visions of Cody (1972). His works of nonfiction are The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1960), Lonesome Traveler (1960), Book of Dreams (1960), and Satori in Paris (1966). His poems are collected in Mexico City Blues (1959), Scattered Poems (1971), Heaven & Other Poems (1977), and San Francisco Blues (1983). In 2004 Douglas Brinkley edited Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947–1954. John Tytell’s Naked Abngels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation (1983) includes Kerouac in his historical and critical context. Stylistic analyses are undertaken by Regina Weinrich in The Spontaneous Prose of Jack Kerouac (1987) and Michael Hrebeniak in Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form (2006). More specifically thematic is James T. Jones’s Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction (1999). Kerouac’s friend Carolyn Cassady has written a memoir, Off the Road (1990). Biographies include Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee’s Jack’s Book: Jack Kerouac in the Lives and Words of His Friends (1978), Tom Clark’s Jack Kerouac (1984), Gerald Nicosia’s Memory Babe (1983), and Ann Charter’s Jack Kerouac (1987). Charters also prepared A Bibliography of Works by Jack Kerouac (1975). Kerouac’s papers are housed in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Nearly forty years after his death, Kerouac remains in some circles a figure of adulation, an icon for independent and rebellious youth, a free spirit hitting the open road, as Walt Whitman called for us to do – but doing it in cars peeling down Western highways. It wasn’t a happy life: it included a series of wrecked marriages and a death from alcoholism in the Florida home of his mother. Kerouac burned out as an artist and died young from drink – how can these truths be components for an American legend? For an answer, we have to look at the moments that he wrote about, the moments when he was at his best – and we have to read him aloud.
1. In a strong voice, while looking for the feel and the sound of Kerouac’s words, read a long paragraph like the one that opens section 10 of “Big Sur.” What do you hear, as a personality and as a contribution to American prose? How do the rhythms and word choices suggest a yearning, and a moment in time?
2. What was Big Sur like in the nineteen fifties? What were San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Carmel, and Monterey like half a century ago, as opposed to now? What has happened to our own imaginative conception of travel, of adventure? Can we still be far away, in the continental United States, as Kerouac and his friends could feel themselves back then?
3. Does this narrative have a structure and go anywhere? If so, what would you say are the elements that shape it? If it has no structure, is that a problem?
