To Be or Not to Bop: Jack Kerouac's On The Road and the culture of bebop and rhythm 'n' blues

Extract

The appearance of On the Road in 1957 signalled the emergence of a new movement in American literature, soon to be called the Beat Generation (Kerouac 1957). Along with Allen Ginsberg's ‘Howl’ of 1956, Kerouac's work brought a new awareness of an intellectual counter-culture bubbling under the conservative surface of 1950s America. The content of these writers' poetry and prose, with its open and honest depiction of hetero-, homo-, and bisexual activity, drug abuse, petty crime, and social deviance was enough to create a sensation, but it is the style that gives the works their permanence and interest today. Kerouac himself used the term ‘bop prose’ to describe his efforts to reform fiction along the lines of avant-garde jazz, where immediacy of expression and technical fluency combine to open new possibilities, supposedly not present in more traditional methods of composition.