Women figure prominently in Kerouac’s work, from novels explicitly about women he had encountered in his life (Maggie Cassidy and Tristessa), to short stories like “Good Blonde,” to the lengthy, often lyrical passages about women in The Subterraneans and On the Road. This chapter explores Kerouac’s controversial representations of women, which are often sexist, misogynist, essentialist, racist. Women in Kerouac’s works, even at their most indelible and dramatic, are, as the Beat writer Joyce Johnson termed them, “minor characters”; they catalyze or support action, struggle for recognition, then disappear from the story. Even when the female characters are presumptively protagonists, as in Maggie Cassidy or Tristessa or “Good Blonde,” they are still not much more than objects of narrative delectation or vehicles for emotional expression.

This chapter examines Kerouac in the context of 1950s literary culture in the United States, with particular emphasis on the Cold War. The 1950s was the decade Kerouac became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road, and the decade he produced the bulk of his most significant writing, including Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, and Mexico City Blues, among others. This chapter explores the relationship between Kerouac’s literary production during the 1950s and the multilayered cultural imperatives of the Cold War.

This chapter begins by scrutinizing The Dharma Bums through the lens of the Romantic/Transcendentalist models that inspired the novel’s re-enchantment of nonhuman material creation. A second part turns to Kerouac’s haiku and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity to show how the concept of Buddhist “Emptiness” considerably enriches his Romantic/Transcendentalist sense of “field-being.” This section argues that the embeddedness of the human mind in the nonhuman combined with a serene acceptance of the latter’s elusiveness actually constitutes one of Kerouac’s important, if paradoxical, contributions to an understanding of the web of environmental continuities. By contrast, the third part moves from Kerouac’s ecospiritual holism to his deep-seated ecophobia: as found in “Desolation Journal,” Desolation Angels, and “Desolation Blues.” A fourth anddiscusses how, despite his environmental angst, Kerouac nevertheless experiments considerably at the level of ecopoetics, probing into a wildness of form that compensates, on the one hand, for the fear that untamed nature instills in his fiction and poetry, and on the other, for the limited presence of any wilderness in his city-inspired texts.

This chapter shows how part of Kerouac’s motivations for his literary experiments was to bring English closer to himself and at the same time to move it away from the monolingualism that dominated US literature and culture. He aimed to create a prose that in its syntax, vocabulary, and rhythms was open to foreignness, which many critics and scholars both then and now have taken for simply bad writing. Though French was his starting point, he wanted to bring American English closer to all languages. Correlatively, in his fiction he depicts peoples of a variety of ethnic and linguistic heritages. In On the Road, the road is Sal Paradise’s means to encounter these different populations and their languages, the place where they all encounter each other. In his other novels, Kerouac paints tenderly detailed pictures of the Franco-American population of Lowell, Massachusetts that he hailed from, as well as towns and cities in places such as France and North Africa. This chapter shows that a major impulse of his writing is to imagine a utopia of global cultural and convergence and to contribute to ushering it into existence.

This chapter examines Kerouac’s later novels such as Big Sur, Satori in Paris, Desolation Angels, and Vanity of Duluoz, showing how he developed a “late style” that was a response to the way his image and writing were commodified by popular and literary culture. These late novels portray the author-narrator as out of step with a culture that has passed him by, as Kerouac suggests the ways his fame as the so-called “King of the Beatniks” led to both his increasing alcoholism, and to new ways of looking at himself in his writing.

This chapter focuses on Kerouac’s epic “Duluoz Legend,” a series of autobiographical books that form the core of his oeuvre. These books include seminal works such as On the Road, Visions of Cody, and The Dharma Bums, and although such books can be read outside the context of the Duluoz Legend, Kerouac saw them as pieces of “one enormous comedy.” This chapter focuses on the Duluoz Legend as a whole, exploring: 1) how the idea of writing a series of autobiographical books “on the run” occurred to Kerouac; 2) how the books comprising the Legend are related; 3) the different literary models for the Legend, with particular attention to the example of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; 5) the various prose styles in the Legend; and 6) how to read the Legend as a record of both Kerouac’s evolving consciousness and the events of his life.

This chapter explores Kerouac’s poetic output, arguing that he should be considered an important twentieth-century poet and poetic innovator. In particular, this chapter explores Kerouac’s book-length poetic masterwork, Mexico City Blues, and his development of an American form of haiku, as found in Book of Haikus and elsewhere. The poetic forms of Mexico City Blues and Book of Haikus are very different, and yet taken together, they demonstrate Kerouac’s range as a poet. With these major works as its focus, this chapter aims to reassess Kerouac’s poetry by reading its formal and thematic preoccupations in terms of the advent of the mid-century “New American Poetry,” which rebuked the norms of the reigning poetic establishment centered in universities and their associated anthologies and quarterlies.

This chapter focuses on Kerouac’s last major novel, Vanity of Duluoz in the context of the 1960s. This novel was composed under fraught conditions as Kerouac labored under intense financial pressure to earn money to pay for his mother’s debilitating illnesses. Not only was it a struggle for Kerouac to complete it, the novel also powerfully documents Kerouac’s struggle with reconciling his traditional, “conservative” upbringing with the nascent “Beat” rebellious energies – born in the forties and continuing into the sixties – a conflict which this chapter explores.

The usual view of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose is that it is a matter of writing fast without reflection, and the story of Kerouac drafting On the Road in April 1951 by typing/composing the whole novel onto a roll of paper in a three-week marathon presumably legitimizes this view. However, this chapter argues that we should understand Spontaneous Prose as a reinvention of textuality rather than simply a matter of writing fast and without reflection, which in turn allows us to understand Kerouac’s responsiveness to modern media (film and analogue recording in particular) to the paradigm of conventional print textuality, bringing into view his development of what might be termed “post-print textuality” in even his seemingly more conventionally written novels. Ultimately, this chapter shows that Kerouac’s experiments with textuality rewrote the standards by which “good literature” in the postwar era was measured.

This chapter examines a central motif that runs throughout Kerouac’s corpus – the desire to capture the events of the past in a literary form that lends them affective force in the present. In novels like Doctor Sax, among many others, Kerouac relied on Spontaneous Prose to infuse the earlier occurrences of his life with renewed vigor and immediacy, resulting in works that challenge the more staid narrative styles of memoir or autobiography. At his best, Kerouac was able to make the past “come alive” again in the present and this sort of intensity has been one of the major reasons for the interest in his work as well as for its longevity. But despite this success, Kerouac’s attempts at writing memory are continually subject to intrusion, indecision, and uncertainty. This chapter shows that Kerouac’s attempts to record memory in a form that retains intensity across time provide insight not only into his literary method, but allow us to reconsider more generally how the events of the past can be usefully brought into the present, and the stakes involved in doing so.

Kerouac considered Visions of Cody his masterpiece. A strange, highly complex work, it is both a radical reimagining and rewriting of some central motifs and characters found in On the Road, and a showcase for Kerouac’s varied theories of writing. If On the Road is “about” the relationship between two friends, a writer and a raconteur, Visions of Cody is about how to best represent this relationship, and so becomes in turn “about” the nature of the writer’s consciousness and his ability to represent or not “the real.” Given such preoccupations, Visions of Cody more closely resembles postmodern metafiction than it does On the Road. This chapter reads it in light of its metafictional experimentations and explorations. In Visions of Cody, Kerouac strives to get down what “actually happened” by turning to sketching, Spontaneous Prose, and even tape recording and transcribing lengthy conversations between him and Neal Cassady. Ultimately, this chapter shows, by reading Visions of Cody as metafiction, we can see how Kerouac created new possibilities and directions for postwar avant-garde writing.

This chapter argues that Kerouac’s oeuvre must be reassessed as a unique case of the literary deployment of the archival. “Spontaneous” names the author’s instrument of choice because it serves his goals of leaving a “complete record” behind and becomes the means of (re)capturing the origins – or provenance – of the poetic insight and narrative structure of his innermost memories. Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose method is thus a technique in the service of the most archival of impulses; the wish to record and preserve all experience for posterity. Spontaneous poetics is where provenance meets recording eye. This thirst for capturing the moment is motivated by Kerouac’s passion for origins – not just regarding his own ancestry and French-Canadianness but, as a writer, he further hopes to record the very inception of all epiphanies, emotions, sensations he experiences. In particular, this chapter examines Visions of Cody, in which his archival sensibility is most evident, showing that the novel both embodies the archival character of Kerouac’s novelistic form while simultaneously serving an archival function of preservation.

In 1959, literary critic Warren Tallman published a landmark study of Kerouac’s spontaneous method that focused on The Subterraneans, a novel Kerouac wrote over the course of just three days in 1953. This chapter builds on Tallman’s work (and other subsequent scholarship) to show how Kerouac adopted the use of spontaneity from what he understood to be a jazz aesthetic, purposively repudiating the reigning New Critical norms that dictated “good” fiction must exhibit certain kinds of “unity” and “selectivity” of expression. This chapter therefore takes The Subterraneans as a concentrated case study in how Kerouac composes, rehearses and constructs a Spontaneous Prose text.

Kerouac’s On the Road had a profound impact on the 1960s’ counterculture. This chapter shows how the ethos of On the Road joined with the ethos of the rock movement that was ushered in shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 by the appearance of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. In addition, the psychedelic rock movement, also inspired by The Beatles, and led by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, pointed to Kerouac’s On the Road as a clarion call of the 1960s’ countercultural zeitgeist. With unprecedented influence over the youth culture of their times, such rock artists as Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, Jim Morrison of The Doors, among others pointed to On the Road as a seminal influence on their lives and art. Furthermore, the political wing of the counterculture, including Abbie Hoffman, also viewed On the Road as an inspiring text. This chapter explores the impact of On the Road on the counterculture, despite the novel’s often conservative message, and views it as a bookend to the 1960s’ counterculture.

Kerouac referred to the Black American as “the essential American” and “the salvation of America,” phrases that, while never adequately explored in Kerouac’s writing, signal at least recognition of the centrality of Black Americans and Black American culture to the broader American society. This chapter explores how consumption of Black culture and Blackness as a catalytic theme weaves throughout Kerouac’s work and is key to his broader aesthetic philosophy. However, this chapter argues that his often superficial readings ignore the reality of Black constraint, subsequently rendering Black life discrepant with the lived experience of Blackness in America. Problematically, his longing is ultimately predicated on Black silence and evasion of Black interiority, and any identification with Blacks is transitory and does not ameliorate his uses of Blackness.

This chapter examines Kerouac’s Buddhism and is informed by archival research of his unpublished Buddhist writing, which in provides a more complete understanding of Kerouac’s Buddhism than what can be learned from his published works. A detailed analysis of his published and unpublished writing reveals that Kerouac’s Buddhist period should be separated into an Early Buddhist Period (1953–58) and a Later Buddhist Period (1959–mid-1960s). Kerouac’s Early Buddhist Period is one of intense study and practice. And while his enthusiasm for the religion certainly decreased from 1959 to his death in 1969, it is inaccurate to state that he did not study Buddhism after 1958, as revealed by his unpublished diaries. Thus, 1959 through to 1967 should be identified as his Later Buddhist Period during which he continued his textual study, occasional meditation practice, and reworking of Buddhist texts. Additionally, this chapter argues that Kerouac believed himself to be a transmitter of Buddhism for Americans and that the Buddhism he believed helped his own suffering – and was, by extension, most useful for American practitioners – was largely rooted in the Diamond Sūtra (Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra) and in key Mahāyāna ideas.