SOURCE: “‘My Virtuous Desert’: Kerouac's Dharma Bums,” in “Forest Beatniks” and “Urban Thoreaus”: Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, and Michael McClure, Peter Lang, 2000, pp. 49-69.

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 pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order—not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker,—not the Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walking” (1851)

As the jacket notes from a recent edition of Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel, The Dharma...