Jack Kerouac
(1922–1969)
(Born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac) American novelist, poet, essayist, and nonfiction writer.
Kerouac is regarded as the one of the key figures of the Beat movement....
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Biography EssayJack Kerouac, regarded in modern American fiction as the authentic voice of the "beat genera- don," thought of himself as a storyteller in the innovative literary tradition of Proust an...
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Jean-Louis Lebris de (Jack) Kerouac (1922-1969), American writer, experimented with spontaneous autobiographical fiction chronicling his travels into the American West. He is known as the father of th...
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Jack Kerouac died, as he had spent much of his adult life, writing. The morning of October 20, 1969, he was sitting in front of his television at his home in St. Petersburg, Florida, jotting down note...
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Jack Kerouac, regarded in modern American fiction as the authentic voice of the "beat generation," thought of himself as a storyteller in the innovative literary tradition of Proust and Joyce, creatin...
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Jack Kerouac, once called "our most misunderstood and underestimated writer," is gradually emerging from that limbo, though much about him remains obscure. The obscurity results from a misreading of h...
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In the following essay, French discusses key differences among The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, Pic, and Kerouac's other major novels.
Gi; the Subterraneans (1953, 1958) =~ Sthe Subterranean...
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In the following essay, Weinreich discusses On the Road as a picaresque novel.
The Open Road. The great home of the soul is the Open Road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not ‘above.’ Not even...
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In the following essay, Weinreich examines Desolation Angels as the culmination of Kerouac's religious and philosophical thinking just before the publication of On the Road.
Do you hear that? T...
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In the following essay, Malmgren asserts that Kerouac achieved an anti-Modernist aesthetic in On the Road.
There was a conference in Boulder, Colorado, in the summer of 1982 to celebrate the twenty-fi...
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In the following essay, Nicosia examines the theme of homelessness in Kerouac's writings, as well as the biographical reasons behind the recurrent theme.
Near the end of his novel On the Road, ...
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In the following essay, Panish argues that Kerouac unwittingly used white stereotypes of African-Americans to achieve intertextuality with black jazz culture in The Subterraneans.
In a review of Jack ...
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In the following essay, Holton explores Kerouac's approach to racial issues in On the Road.
We need studies that analyze the strategic use of black characters to define the goals and enhance th...
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In the following essay, Eburne analyzes the wider social implications of the Beat generation by examining subversiveness in The Subterraneans and William S. Burroughs's The Naked Lunch.
Abjecti...
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In the following essay, Douglas examines the reactions Kerouac elicited from the readers of his fictional autobiographies.
Explaining the special nature of his friendship with Jack Kerouac, Allen Gins...
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In the following essay, Grace analyzes the significance of race in Kerouac's stories about romantic relationships.
Jack Kerouac is generally not thought of as a writer of love stories, his name...
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In the following essay, Phillips discusses Kerouac's works concerning the natural world, particularly The Dharma Bums.
“[M]y companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleas...
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Critical Essay by Seymour Krim
With each passing book Jack Kerouac begins to come down to earth a little more, to reveal what he's made of and allow for some practical judgments. There has been...
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Critical Essay by Kingsley Widmer
[Central] to Beat writers, though little noticed, is the desperate flight from lower middle class life and its culture of anxiety. The unredeemable horrors of petit b...
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Critical Essay by Allen Ginsberg
Kerouac was the first writer I ever met who heard his own writing, who listened to his own sentences as if they were musical, rhythmical constructions, and who could f...
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Critical Essay by J. Meredith Neil
[Kerouac's novels], taken together, exemplify a change of consciousness so subversive to prevailing American values and institutions and so attractive, at lea...
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Critical Essay by Robert A. Hipkiss
The father and mother images in Kerouac indicate a strong fear of the masculine world and a concomitant Oedipal tie to the mother. This repulsion-attraction syndrom...
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Critical Essay by Small Press Review
[Dear Carolyn, Letters to Carolyn Cassady] spans the decade from 1952 to 1962. The first letter, June 3, 1952, sings the praises of the cheap life in Mexico, and i...
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In part 1, chapter 2, Kerouac presents the idea of the American dream through descriptions of himself.
"I left with my canvas bag in which a few fundamental things were packed and too...
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Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
