SOURCE: “‘Telepathic Shock and Meaning Excitement’: Kerouac's Poetics of Intimacy,” in College Literature, Vol. 27, No. 1, winter, 2000, pp. 8-21.

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 Ginsberg said that early in their relationship he realized that, “If I actually confessed the secret tendencies of my soul, he would understand nakedly who I was” (Watson 1995, 37). I think a number of Kerouac's readers even today feel the same way. I, for one, seem to know Kerouac better, he's dearer to me, than all but a few people in my actual life, and the extended confessions he called his “true—story novels” tell me that I am somehow just as important to him.

Every writer enters into a relationship with his reader, offering at the outset a kind of contract that...