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 assesses Kerouac’s literary career from the perspective of the profession of authorship. Despite his bohemian reputation, Kerouac was a diligent professional writer who engaged publishers directly and via literary agents in order to actively manage his professional career. Kerouac’s goal was to convince publishers and thus the reading public of the significance of his signature artistic style, which he called “Spontaneous Prose.” Viking Press was not interested in his Spontaneous Prose books as viable sellers, and his income and reputation declined in proportion with his insistence on producing books in this style. Despite the belief held by many Kerouac fans today that he was a literary saint who disavowed money and materialism, in fact he both wanted to make money and earn literary respect based on his artistic merits. He was not a commercial writer per se, since he sacrificed publication for the integrity of his art, but he did want the publishing industry to see the inherent value in his Spontaneous Prose books.

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 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.

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 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.

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 charts the rise of the Beat novel by tracing an arc from Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, to Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. The chapter discusses a range of novels, from George Mandel's Flee the Angry Strangers and Chandler Brossard’s Who Walk in Darkness, to Kerouac’s On the Road and Visions of Cody, and Burroughs’s Junky, Queer, and Naked Lunch.